Solved Will Macrium restore work without being able to boot W7.

[provlima]

can no longer boot up my 9 year old Dell PC

I have tried many recommendations from W7 forum users ..booting from the OS rescue disc etc all to no avail
They all result in a windows blue screen with out the windows logo with a branch and white bird image on the right side and a larger cursor like it would appear in safe mode.

When I shut down and try to reboot from my OS CD disk I get prompts asking for my language preference and time zone, then the screen indicates that windows is loading files

a few minutes later at the completion of the process the above described blue window screen re appears and Im back where I started still unable to boot Windows.

As a last resort I was thinking of restoring my old hdd using a macrium back up disk I created earlier this year.
Could this be done without being able to access my W7 OS operating system?
If not can I restore my macrium back up to a new hdd
Thanks for your help

 

[RolandJS]

"...As a last resort I was thinking of restoring my old hdd using a macrium back up disk I created earlier this year. Could this be done without being able to access my W7 OS operating system?
If not can I restore my macrium back up to a new hdd..."
If I understand correctly, the only hardware difference is the old HD was replaced with a new HD sometime earlier. MR will need to be "told" which full image to restore onto which partition on that old HD, I've done at in the past. If your MR has been logging backups, sometimes I find it easier to simply "do away" with such logs and "restore manually".
I think your Windows will make some minor adjustments and keep on trucking.
Please let us know how things go.

 

[mrjimphelps]

If you made a Macrium rescue disk, you can boot the computer with that disk. You won't need Windows in that case; you will boot right into Macrium. You can then restore a Macrium backup to the computer.

I would go with a new hard drive, or with an SSD. Your current drive is nine years old. If it isn't already failing, it will soon. Also, a new drive will be bigger and faster, a lot faster if you go with an SSD. And you will be resetting the failure clock back to zero if you replace the old drive with a new drive.

My guess is that your hard drive is what is causing your install problem.

 

[mjf]

I would also go for a new drive. If your system image will restore to say a 256GB SSD then I'd go that way. Your old Dell will perform like a newer PC. But you will probably want more data storage so provided the PC has a spare sata port I'd also install at least one HDD data drive.
When you restore the image to an SSD or a HDD replace the drive in the original sata 0 port and temporarily disconnect any other HDDs.

 

[provlima]

Thanks all for your help!

Just would appreciate getting some clarification
The Dell desktop has an i7 chip so I'd hate to replace it with a new i7 PC because they are expensive

My Macrium Backup for the Dell 8100 desktop was on an external backup drive

The bad drive is an esata drive. I notice that current drives seem to be sata iii drives. Wil the old Dell PC mother board support the new sata iii drives

If I replace the bad hard drive would I be able to restore the W7 OS and all my data by using the macrium
backup file on the old backup drive?

 

[RolandJS]

"...If I replace the bad hard drive would I be able to restore the W7 OS and all my data by using the macrium
backup file on the old backup drive?" All things considered, I think the above should work out just fine.

 

[mrjimphelps]

If I replace the bad hard drive would I be able to restore the W7 OS and all my data by using the macrium backup file on the old backup drive?

Yes. I did that earlier this year, when I replaced the HDD with an SDD in my laptop.

 

[provlima]

Thank you very much for chiming in The only thing I dont understand is how do you access your backup drive to initiate the restore process?

 

[RolandJS]

...The only thing I don't understand is how do you access your backup drive to initiate the restore process?

The computer will need to have the source hard-drive and the target hard-drive attached while booting either a USB or a DVD containing the backup / restore / cloning program.

 

[provlima]

Thank you for your help and patience!
Was able to locate the restore image and went through the Macrium restore process that took several hours.
Unfortunately when I tried to start the restored PC i got the BOOTMGR is missing, press control alternate delete to restart which I did and I again get the same missing BOOTMGR message.
Any ideas what may be causing this.

I was under the impression that Macrium restore process would create a mirror image of my old hdd partitions and all. Is this assumption correct ?

 

[RolandJS]

"...I was under the impression that Macrium Reflect restore process would create a mirror image of my old hdd partitions and all. Is this assumption correct ?" Yes, if the user had MR make a full image backup of all the existing partitions or if the user had MR make a full image of the entire hard-drive.

 

[mrjimphelps]

Was able to locate the restore image and went through the Macrium restore process that took several hours. Unfortunately when I tried to start the restored PC i got the BOOTMGR is missing, press control alternate delete to restart which I did and I again get the same missing BOOTMGR message.
Any ideas what may be causing this.

This happened to me. I found that if I did the recovery after booting with the rescue disk, I didn't get this error. A question popped up at the very end of the process, indicating that there was one more task to do. I did that task (don't remember what it was), and it booted into Windows after that.