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System Restore not working (0x8000ffff); neither is Macrium Reflect
My computer has been shutting itself off for no reason that I can tell, although it usually seems to happen when I am away from it rather than right while I am doing something. Tried changing power management to never go to sleep, but that doesn't stop it from occurring.
Also got a message that regular weekly backup did not occur. I think the backup problem was a space issue on the external HDD, so I freed up some space and tried to re-run backup. But it takes a long time to run and ends up shutting off before it completes, so I don't have much faith that the backups it has been trying to make the last couple days are worth anything. On the plus side, I made my own backup of all data files on two separate portable HDDs so I believe I'm safe.
Today I decided to run a system restore, picking a point before where I thought problems had started. I do have restore points available, one before a windows critical update on 4/15 and one before installing turbo tax on 4/13. I get an error message for either one, System Restore did not complete successfully, failed to extract the file (C:\) from the restore point. An unspecified error occurred 0x8000ffff. There are other restore points dating back to December, but System Restore apparently can't find them to use.
Next I decided to restore image using Macrium Reflect free edition from an image that was created 8/17/14 after following tutorials Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 and Clean Up Factory Bloatware -- the image that was to be my gold standard for starting over. When I start Macrium Reflect, I can see my clean image stored on my G drive, a second HDD mounted inside the computer, but I can't restore the image because of a message that says it is unable to lock the drive. Then I try to boot from the rescue media created when the Reflect image was created, but when I do that it can't see the G drive to find the image that I want to restore.
Clearly I don't know what I'm doing and would appreciate any assistance that could be offered.