Macrium Reflect: incomplete copy?

So I used Macrium Reflect to copy my old hard drive as it's several years old and I didn't want to lose any data in case it failed. Everything seemed to go swimmingly after I ran the program, except now when I boot from my new hard drive, I can't run windows updates, nor open/uninstall certain programs (problem with Windows Installer Service). Also, if I disconnect the old drive from the mobo, Windows will not fully load from the new drive (it gets stuck at "Preparing your desktop...", a message I never see normally). Does anyone know what I can do to fix this?

Does the old drive still contain everything and will it work if you remove the new drive and boot to the old one? If so, I recommend you do so and make sure everything is fine. Then power down and insert the new drive in secondary position and boot again to the old drive. Once you've verified you really are booted to the old drive and not the new one, then use the old drive to reformat the new drive (a full format, not a quick format). Then try the process again - perhaps there was some flaw in the copy process and doing it again will make things work correctly. Before you do it, I recommend you first review the tutorials and forums as noted below to make sure you are doing it correctly. I've never used the product, so I'm not sure exactly how it works and just following the prompts may not be enough.

If that doesn't work, I recommend you contact their support group. They have a forum where you can post questions and get responses like this here (unless you have the free version - then you can only view the forum and not post): Macrium Reflect Disk Imaging and Backup - Support. Also, you can try the tutorials and search for creating a disk image and restoring a disk image: Macrium Reflect Disk Imaging and Backup - Tutorials.

I hope this helps. If not, post back and we'll see if we can do more research into the process and see what might be going wrong.

Good luck!

I've never restored to a new HD using Macrium. But from what I've been told on other boards, the easiest way is to put the new HD in a USB 2.0 docking station. Initialize the drive and restore to it from the Macrium Image. According to these system builder dudes that use this approach. You open the box, stick the new drive in, and it boots with nothing more to do.

edit: if you don't have access to or can't afford external drives and docking stations you may be better off to use a dedicated HD clone program. There are free ones out there. If the new HD is larger just make sure the program can accommodate copying to a larger drive(some of the free ones do a sector by sector copy.. very simplistic.)

For a bit more interesting info why Macrium may not work as used in this case, see this thread on their forum:

http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2810

I reformatted and went through the Macrium Reflect process again after disconnecting the old drive and using the linux interface to "restore" the new disk, and now the new drive has loaded Windows perfectly. It seems like the problem was Windows didn't know how to deal with two identical drives. Thanks for the help!

Windows deliberately doesn't know. Or, put another way, it knows it doesn't want you to run 2 images on the same machine of 1 licensed copy of Windows... or something like that.