Macrium Reflect not recognizing external HD

[ntoren]

Hi, new to the forums. I was having some HDD issues and decided to get a new internal hard drive prior to any major hard drive failure. Once the replacement HDD arrived from Amazon, I used Macrium Reflect free edition to successfully created a rescue cd, made a Macrium mirror image of my C: on an external HD, and verified the image. Then I shut down the computer, unplugged the internal hard drive, plugged in the new blank hard drive internally, plugged in my external hard drive containing the mirror image via USB and put the rescue cd in the computer. Powered up and got the rescue wizard started. Followed a few steps but when it came time to select an image to restore, my external hard drive did not appear. I tried plugging the external into three different USB ports but no luck. The external doesn't even show up - it's not a matter of the image not being discovered.

Could there be something to do with my computer where it doesn't recognize USB drives while in rescue/recovery status?

Many thanks!
Nick

 

[Kaktussoft]

Does external usb show up on another laptop?

 

[ntoren]

Well, I'm working on a desktop. I plugged the drive into another desktop and the drive did show up. It has a mirror image file on it, *.mrimg

 

[Kaktussoft]

What kind of rescue dvd did you create?

 

[ntoren]

I chose the first option, Linux. And I created a rescue cd, not a dvd. Is that appropriate?
If it makes a difference, this computer was a Vista computer and I upgraded it a couple years ago to Windows 7 via a software download.

 

[kado897]

This is the version 5 of macrium, which is probably what you have. I recommend creating the WinPE recue disk. It is much more reliable. Unfortunately for the free version it involves a 1.7GB download of the WAIK from microsoft.

 

[ntoren]

I subsequently started the 30-day free trial of Macrium 5 after having no luck with free v. 4.2. Downloaded the WAIK (wow, that was big), created the PE rescue disk (actually on a thumb drive) and still no luck. With my internal HDD unplugged, my computer boots into Windows but the external HDD still doesn't show up.

 

[kado897]

Try shutting down completely and powering everything off including the USB Drive. Then power on and boot into Macrium again.

 

[ntoren]

Tried again but still no luck. When in Macrium rescue mode there are two tabs, [Backup] and [Restore]. Interestingly, when I click on Backup I see my external hard drive (which contains the mirror image). However, when I click on the Restore tab the drive does not show up. I did some browsing for the image file but either the software is so non-intuitive that I can't locate it, or the software/computer is having a hard time recognizing the drive/file as something it can restore from.

 

[writhziden]

Are you by chance using a USB 3.0 port? In my experience, Macrium/WAIK does not have the USB 3.0 drivers installed. I am able to install them manually on my system, but then it does not find the drivers for the external drive. USB 3.0 not being supported by Macrium's Windows PE is rather frustrating. I am lucky my laptop has a 2.0 port or I would be in deep caca.

 

[ntoren]

Plain old 2.0, I'm guessing, since the computer is from 2007.

 

[writhziden]

Ah, good, that is not the problem then. At least that eliminates a possibility.

 

[Kaktussoft]

Did you create a partition backup or full disk backup? Only backupped partition C?
How large is backup file? How large do you want the new C partition to be?
New harddisk is empty?
what's size of new harddisk?

 

[kado897]

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