Trying to restore to an image after wiping drive

I'm really a novice at this but my son is using Macrium Reflect Pro 5.0 to backup to create images for a Windows 7 Dell XPX 8700 PC. He ended up with some corrupt files and I was told by a computer tech (he messed with his PC for an hour) that I either needed to wipe the hard drive and do a Clean Install, or try to restore to an earlier image. I had just done an image backup the day before the issues began so the tech wasn't entirely sure the image backup wasn't corrupted too but might be worth a shot. I do have another image about 6 months old that's not corrected guess that would be better than starting from scratch.

I always Optimize the drive before reinstalling Windows so I thought I could wipe the drive by SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation and then do the MR image restore but apparently I can't or don't know how. This computer has MR's "Boot Menu" option installed to make it easy to restore to an image.

Once I Optimized the drive I removed the Windows CD and rebooted thinking I would get the option of the MR boot menu but I don't. Guess this is how little I know about how this process works or just how dumb I am.

I'm thinking now my only option now to do a Clean Install... correct?

Say I would still like to try to restore to a backed up image after doing a Clean Install. What if I installed Macrium Reflect (with the Boot Menu option) then rebooted to the MR option and restored to an image. Should this work?


Mike

Have you booted reflect CD and tried the image that way? Did you image all partitions?

Well I didn't think I had made a MR Rescue CD for that computer but I did just find one. I imaged my C drive that Windows is installed one.

A few minutes ago I tried booting from the Rescue disk and selected my latest image thinking everything would go smoothly. When it got to 2% though I got an error screen saying there were corrupted files. So then I tried a different image backup and got exactly the same error screen also at 2%.

Does any of this make sense I can't believe both of my backups are corrupt?

In the process of doing a Clean Install still hoping I might be able to fall back on an image backup so I don't have to reinstall all of the programs.

If you only did drive c and not system reserved it's not going to work as that's what it boots from. Have you tried deleting all partitions but leave system reserved then see if it will restore

Sorry I meant to say I included also system reserve. It's my third attempt at restoring an image without an error and so far 10% without an error so holding my breath.

Well made it to 10% this time but then got the corrupt file error 5 again. Any ideas?

Were is the image held can you copy it to another location see if it copies error free. I would also redo a new boot disk with reflect in case that is the problem did you leave the disk blank there could be a error on the hd

samuria said:

Were is the image held can you copy it to another location see if it copies error free. I would also redo a new boot disk with reflect in case that is the problem did you leave the disk blank there could be a error on the hd

Samurai I have the image on a Seagate External drive but suppose I could transfer it to another external drive I have and try to restore from there. The computer also has another internal drive my son uses for his music. If there is room on it would it be preferable to transfer to it and restore from there?

Before reinstalling Windows I wiped the drive by writing 0's to it or whatever Optimizing a drive does. When I reinstalled Windows I apparently wiped the drivers and so have no internet so can't download anything. I'm installing Windows again to see if anything will be different.

I'll try your suggestion transferring the image but if that doesn't work guess I'll pay Dell tech support (don't want to) to fix it but at that point will be back to installing from scratch.