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#11
Actually, there was a reason I'm not using Acronis 2013 here. I actually purchased 2013 for another office and I didn't much care for some of the changes they made.
Did someone post "6 month old OS"??? Win 7's been around since 2010!
Anyway, to my horror I found the RAID array irrevocably corrupted. At least for my level of IT chops it was.
One thing I maybe should have tried with the Win 7 OEM CD was INSTALL>UPGRADE, instead of only trying the OS repair feature. Maybe I could have fixed the MBR without blowing out the files but I'll never know. Still doesn't change the fact that Disk 0 was showing up as NON-RAID. Don't think the CD could have fixed that. First I got "NTLDR missing", and then later I got both disks to show up as RAID 0 again, but then it was a "disk read failure" error. Don't like that one.
So I made a new array. Made it a mirror this time.
So I re-installed Win 7 from the CD, on a formatted 80G partition, and then after up and running, I recovered from my Acronis .tib disk image WITHOUT checking the "Recover MBR/ track 0" box.
After restoring the original system partition from Acronis .tib file, I got "server execution failed explorer.exe" trying to open any window or menu item in the primary user's login. USERS>DOCUMENTS, etc., all that stuff had been on the DATA logical partition, still not restored. Control panel would not open.
I logged on as a different user with Admin rights (glad I made a backdoor in), then created a second partition in Disk Mgmt. Recovered the second .tib (data) disk image to that.
Still got "server execution failed explorer.exe" logging in as her because the drive letter had changed after backup. Once I changed the partition drive letter, it's finally over. The PC's back.
FYI the way I usually leverage Acronis is CLONE, along with letting nonstop backup run. This was the first time (and do you think LAST? I do) that I used partition backup. I will only use "clone disk" from here on.
I obviously have a call logged with Acronis Support (customerservice at Acronis dot com) but I would love a real answer as to why this happened. When I checked the backups after they were done, I did not execute any recovery operation. I booted from the recovery CD I had made (Acronis) and browsed to the backups just to make sure they were selectable. Then I canceled. But I would guess it was there, during that part, when the stupid program broke the MBR of the PC. I can't believe that simply copying the partition f__ed it up. But I guess it's possible.