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  • Question:

    Can I re-deploy a Macrium Reflect disk image onto a computer that is not the original computer?

  • Context:

I recently got one of my laptops stolen. Luckily, I had a Macrium Reflect disk image from the laptop (Lenovo T520 - up-to-date drivers). I had a Lenovo L540 laptop lying around and decided to re-deploy the image onto that laptop. The reason is that I have a plethora of programs installed for work for which I do not want to go through the process of re-installing everything (plus the question of licenses for those programs). In that respect, "why don't you do a fresh install instead?" is the last restart.

I am coming from an HDD 500GB to an SSD 250GB. I have two partitions: System and Data. Data contains the user's data and System contains Windows and all the programs installed.

  • Problem:

First, the original image was too large for the new hard drive, so I had to do the following: get a hard drive, re-deploy the "System" partition, downsize it (removing some stuffs like pagefile.sys and hiberfile.sys and plenty of other things), re-create an image with Macrium of the cleaned partition. I did the same with the "Data" partition. I then deployed the downsized images onto the new SSD. Notice that I had two distinct images to load onto the same disk.

Second, I tried booting the new laptop and saw a blue screen. Windows 7 is unable to boot. I tried booting in Safe Mode but did not work either. I tried the Windows recuperation tool, but it failed to succeed.

  • Ideas on troubleshooting?

Does it matter that it is another laptop (i.e. hardware) for the Windows license?

  • Important note: I still have the original large single image with System and Data partitions, with hiberfile and pagefile on it.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Improve this question
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  • A bootable Macrium Reflect media should boot anywhere and theoretically any image can be restored to a different PC. Whether that, being a system partition, will boot or not is unrelated. And yes, license matters: OEM licenses aren't transferable. And if it doesn't boot the best you can do is using Windows installation media to repair it.
    – user772515
    Jan 19, 2018 at 13:48
  • Thank you @MichaelBay for your answer. If I follow what you are saying, I should: 1) create a rescue media (knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/Creating+rescue+media), 2) boot from it, 3) open macrium and follow these instructions (knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/…). Is it possible that there is a problem with the MBR of the disk?
    – Olivier Hubert
    Jan 19, 2018 at 14:13
  • You already waste a lot of time imaging and then butchering the image because the target is smaller. It seldom works after that and also there are only an handful of cases and very specific ones where recovering an image is the advisable method. Your reasoning - a plethora of programs installed for work for which I do not want to go through the process of re-installing everything (plus the question of licenses for those programs) - is flawed. The OS itself and most of those software are likely to not work without repair/re installation.
    – user772515
    Jan 19, 2018 at 14:23
  • And if the licenses are tied to the hardware you're already on the wrong side of the law. Now, typically, only the Windows license, if OEM, is tied to the hardware. All the other softwares most likely aren't. So, most likely it would take much less time reinstalling Windows and those software that doing what you are doing now (and can't possibly work for several reason but mostly due to the need of hiberfile and pagefile).
    – user772515
    Jan 19, 2018 at 14:26
  • @MichaelBay, thanks a lot for your comments. It seems that I have little choice remaining to solve my problem. I thought it would be relatively straightforward but I hadn't considered all the implications of what I wanted to do. Thanks again for your time.
    – Olivier Hubert
    Jan 19, 2018 at 15:12

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