Restoring from Macrium Reflect

[Yousuf Khan]

I had made a system image backup using Macrium Reflect. I recently had a
misadventure with trying to install SP1 onto Windows 7, which screwed it
up completely, so I had to restore from Macrium. After 25 hours
restoring from a USB hard disk, it finally finished restoring. I tried
rebooting from this image but as it began to boot it would automatically
BSOD after a few seconds and restart before I could read the BSOD
message. I have reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch again, but I'd like
to restore the image I had saved again. Is there something that anyone
can suggest as to why it was BSOD'ing?

The same system is a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux on it, so I'm able to
operate it off of Linux at the moment.

Yousuf Khan

 

[mike]

I had made a system image backup using Macrium Reflect. I recently had a
misadventure with trying to install SP1 onto Windows 7, which screwed it
up completely, so I had to restore from Macrium. After 25 hours
restoring from a USB hard disk, it finally finished restoring. I tried
rebooting from this image but as it began to boot it would automatically
BSOD after a few seconds and restart before I could read the BSOD
message. I have reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch again, but I'd like
to restore the image I had saved again. Is there something that anyone
can suggest as to why it was BSOD'ing?

The same system is a dual boot with Ubuntu Linux on it, so I'm able to
operate it off of Linux at the moment.

Yousuf Khan

I had a similar problem with a dual boot system.
If you installed linux after windows, grub probably took over.
When you restored windows, windows probably wanted to be in control
of the boot and points to the wrong place.

For a single system, you can boot the win7 disk and tell it to automagically
fix boot issues. That's worked extremely well for me.
But Dual boot may mess that up too.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I had a similar problem with a dual boot system.
If you installed linux after windows, grub probably took over.
When you restored windows, windows probably wanted to be in control
of the boot and points to the wrong place.

For a single system, you can boot the win7 disk and tell it to
automagically
fix boot issues. That's worked extremely well for me.
But Dual boot may mess that up too.

Yeah, I did try using the Win7 install disk to fix things up. But it
couldn't find the issue, and kept complaining about a bad driver, which
I thought the Win7 disk itself was supposed to fix up for me.

Yousuf Khan

 

[mike]

Yeah, I did try using the Win7 install disk to fix things up. But it
couldn't find the issue, and kept complaining about a bad driver, which
I thought the Win7 disk itself was supposed to fix up for me.

Yousuf Khan

I'm way out of my element, but rod will step in and tell me that I'm
totally wrong...In the process you'll get an alternative look at things.

Are you doing anything off the main road?
Did you have to install any drivers when you installed the original win7?
RAID?
Non-standard disk interface card?
64-bit windows?
I don't have any of that, so can't help fix it.
I use win7 ultimate just so I don't have to worry about what they
deleted from the lesser versions that will cause me trouble.
I don't know of any hardware compatibilities in the lesser versions,
but I wouldn't put it past MS to introduce subtleties to make you
buy the expensive version.

There's another thing that win7 does to mess up dual-boot and image
restores.
The standard win7 install puts a small partition first, then the C
partition followed by subsequent ones. It doesn't give you any
choice in the matter.

I use acronis 10 PE. The dated free version. I could not get a successful
image restore because of the added partition. Windows starts to boot
based on what the bios told it. Somewhere in the middle, it looks up
the drive mapping and pulls the rug out from under itself and crashes
with, "I can't find the drive I've just loaded this error message from."
I do believe recent versions of Acronis can deal with it, but no idea
about Macrium.

My solution to the problem was to prevent win7 from
partitioning/formatting the
drive.
I used GPARTED to create just the partitions with drive letters and NOT
that extra hidden partition. Win7 installs just fine and now, I can restore
the image and the system will boot.
You do give up some stuff when you delete the hidden partition. Something
about encryption of usb drives...maybe some other stuff that I never needed.

When you dual-boot, grub does things
I don't understand at all. Not clear if that messes things up too.
I've dual-booted xp and ubuntu, but never tried win7.
One thing I learned about Grub is that recent versions of Ubuntu
use GRUB2, even tho the grub splash screen says GRUB.
You can google yourself silly and it'll be an accident if you trip
over that distinction that lets you find tutorials that apply.

There's another thing happening. My systems are so old that they may
not have the latest boot innovations. If I try to use a SATA drive,
things get really messed up. I don't have any option to boot from
a PATA drive if a SATA drive is installed. If there's a SATA drive it
just boots from it no matter what I tell it in the bios. I can't restore
a PATA image to a SATA drive. Same thing about the drive mapping
getting all messed up in the middle of the boot process. I had to use the
newer version of Acronis that came with the WD drive to CLONE the
PATA drive to the SATA drive. That kept the mapping straight.

Not sure if any of that helps, but may give you some places to look.
mike

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I'm way out of my element, but rod will step in and tell me that I'm
totally wrong...In the process you'll get an alternative look at things.

Are you doing anything off the main road?

No, in fact, I went out of my way to make sure I had mostly standard
things in my system this time. The system was originally running Windows
XP, and was upgraded to Win 7. Now there is no way to do a real upgrade
of XP to 7, so Windows 7 simply backs up your entire Windows XP critical
files and puts them into a folder called Windows.Old. So it basically
becomes a brand new installation, where you have to re-install from
scratch.

Did you have to install any drivers when you installed the original win7?

No, everything came up fine with just the OS installer disk. Some minor
things had to have their drivers downloaded from the Windows Update
site, but obviously if you can get into the system enough to get to
Windows Update, you basically have a fully functional system already.

RAID?
Non-standard disk interface card?

I was going to install an additional SATA card into the system after the
SP1 upgrade, but it wasn't put in yet.

64-bit windows?
Yes.

I don't have any of that, so can't help fix it.
I use win7 ultimate just so I don't have to worry about what they
deleted from the lesser versions that will cause me trouble.
I don't know of any hardware compatibilities in the lesser versions,
but I wouldn't put it past MS to introduce subtleties to make you
buy the expensive version.

I'm using the Win 7 Ultimate too, 64-bit in this case.

There's another thing that win7 does to mess up dual-boot and image
restores.
The standard win7 install puts a small partition first, then the C
partition followed by subsequent ones. It doesn't give you any
choice in the matter.

I never noticed this when I installed, all of the partitions remained as
they were when originally setup, running previous versions of Windows
(Win2K, followed by XP).

In fact, I've now reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch again, and it
didn't install any additional partition. I usually see a small partition
setup with OEM Windows versions, which create the partition as a
recovery partition.

I use acronis 10 PE. The dated free version. I could not get a successful
image restore because of the added partition. Windows starts to boot
based on what the bios told it. Somewhere in the middle, it looks up
the drive mapping and pulls the rug out from under itself and crashes
with, "I can't find the drive I've just loaded this error message from."
I do believe recent versions of Acronis can deal with it, but no idea
about Macrium.

My solution to the problem was to prevent win7 from
partitioning/formatting the
drive.
I used GPARTED to create just the partitions with drive letters and NOT
that extra hidden partition. Win7 installs just fine and now, I can restore
the image and the system will boot.
You do give up some stuff when you delete the hidden partition. Something
about encryption of usb drives...maybe some other stuff that I never
needed.

Interesting, never ran across it. As I said, I had a pre-existing
Windows partition, and Win 7 just installed itself into same one.

When you dual-boot, grub does things
I don't understand at all. Not clear if that messes things up too.
I've dual-booted xp and ubuntu, but never tried win7.
One thing I learned about Grub is that recent versions of Ubuntu
use GRUB2, even tho the grub splash screen says GRUB.
You can google yourself silly and it'll be an accident if you trip
over that distinction that lets you find tutorials that apply.

I'm still using the Grub1, as I've had Ubuntu installed here since 5.04.
Ubuntu doesn't replace Grub1 with Grub2 unless you start from scratch
with Ubuntu. Ubuntu has always been simply updated ever since after the
first install.

There's another thing happening. My systems are so old that they may
not have the latest boot innovations. If I try to use a SATA drive,
things get really messed up. I don't have any option to boot from
a PATA drive if a SATA drive is installed. If there's a SATA drive it
just boots from it no matter what I tell it in the bios. I can't restore
a PATA image to a SATA drive. Same thing about the drive mapping
getting all messed up in the middle of the boot process. I had to use the
newer version of Acronis that came with the WD drive to CLONE the
PATA drive to the SATA drive. That kept the mapping straight.

Not sure if any of that helps, but may give you some places to look.
mike

The SATA drives can be installed into one of two modes, IDE-emulation
mode and AHCI-native mode. I have them running in AHCI mode. I might try
them in IDE mode to see if that helps.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Yousuf Khan]

The SATA drives can be installed into one of two modes, IDE-emulation
mode and AHCI-native mode. I have them running in AHCI mode. I might try
them in IDE mode to see if that helps.

Yousuf Khan

Success!!! After I switched the drive modes in the BIOS from AHCI back
to IDE, then the restored Windows 7 worked again!

It looks like I may have switched to AHCI mode sometime after that
system backup image was taken. That's the difference between Linux and
Windows: Linux just handles the SATA transparently, no matter what the
mode; Windows needs to be configured ahead of time.

Yousuf Khan

 

[mike]

No, in fact, I went out of my way to make sure I had mostly standard
things in my system this time. The system was originally running Windows
XP, and was upgraded to Win 7. Now there is no way to do a real upgrade
of XP to 7, so Windows 7 simply backs up your entire Windows XP critical
files and puts them into a folder called Windows.Old. So it basically
becomes a brand new installation, where you have to re-install from
scratch.


No, everything came up fine with just the OS installer disk. Some minor
things had to have their drivers downloaded from the Windows Update
site, but obviously if you can get into the system enough to get to
Windows Update, you basically have a fully functional system already.


I was going to install an additional SATA card into the system after the
SP1 upgrade, but it wasn't put in yet.


I'm using the Win 7 Ultimate too, 64-bit in this case.


I never noticed this when I installed, all of the partitions remained as
they were when originally setup, running previous versions of Windows
(Win2K, followed by XP).

In fact, I've now reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch again, and it
didn't install any additional partition. I usually see a small partition
setup with OEM Windows versions, which create the partition as a
recovery partition.


Interesting, never ran across it. As I said, I had a pre-existing
Windows partition, and Win 7 just installed itself into same one.

I wasn't clear. If the drive is already partitioned, win7 just uses it.
That's what I did with GPARTED.
The partition gets installed if you let the win7 install partition the
drive.

Glad you figgered it out.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

I wasn't clear. If the drive is already partitioned, win7 just uses it.
That's what I did with GPARTED.
The partition gets installed if you let the win7 install partition the
drive.

Glad you figgered it out.

So what exactly am I missing out on if I don't have that special
partition? Did you find a webpage that explained what that partition
did? Will I not be able to encrypt USB drives without this partition,
for example?

Yousuf Khan

 

[mike]

So what exactly am I missing out on if I don't have that special
partition? Did you find a webpage that explained what that partition
did? Will I not be able to encrypt USB drives without this partition,
for example?

Yousuf Khan

Short answer is that I have no idea.

There's some automagic encryption scheme for USB drives. It apparently
stores
some keys or info or something on this partition.
AS I recall, you can't even read the thumbdrive on another system
that's not win7. Renders it useless for most of us now, but may
be of benefit when we're all win7 enabled.

I personally avoid anything M$ if I can help it. If I want encryption,
I use third party stuff that has the decrypter on the thumbdrive.

When I googled it some time ago, I got a zillion hits on the subject,
but never found a concise description of what's going on. M$ probably
doesn't even want you to know that the partition exists...for your
protection.

If you find something useful, publish the link.