marmite

Whatever the problem was I don't think it's Reflect per se; but it was certainly the restore that went awry. So if it were me I'd want to do my Reflect restore back onto the same drive; after all that's what Reflect is for. If that means that you clone your original drive so be it. For me, for this experiment to be reasonably conclusive, you need to do the back-up, the test restore and the nuke all on the same disk. Then see how the post-nuke restore goes.

Scanning Desktop Shortcuts merely validates the shortcut targets. The size of those target files should be irrelevant. I think ident's test demonstrates that. http://docs.piriform.com/ccleaner/ccleaner...ab/system-files

1 I believe so. 2 I originally thought Reflect needed a partition. I've since learned I was wrong because Reflect will create its own - so I think your statement 2 is also correct. 3 That is a very good question. We also don't know what MBR options were specified on restore, since Reflect offers three options. How many of them were tried?

If you really want to get to the bottom of it, clear all of the CCleaner settings. Add them back in one at a time and run CCleaner after each one, then see if there's an effect on McAfee. At least then you should be able to identify which setting is causing you a problem.

No worries Yep you can just install as normal and copy the shortcut to All Users if required. All of my Piriform products installed to my own user. If you download this simple, freestanding start-up tool ... http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml ... you can easily see where your shortcuts are and move them between start-up locations.

More than can be said for England - Italy

Cheers Dennis. Anomaly came out with the Macrium link earlier; I've now added that to the first post since that may be quite sufficient for most users. I've learned quite a lot from various posters' feedback and it's been a pretty constructive exercise

Yup. Next step is to unload one iso and load another without rebooting. That may depend on a combination of how the iso program terminates and your linux skills - not currently my forte.

My restore was just a test, not out of necessity - so I was rather glad to see it go without hitch. Agreed about the USB advantages - particularly the ease of update. Also it's nice to be able to launch other isos from the same drive - becomes a recovery toolkit on a stick.

The penderivelinux method in the first post uses different USB formating (FAT32) and it may be a different linux flavour (although really I doubt that's a factor) ... could be worth a go Incidentally I've actually restored my system volume from a USB boot - so I now have complete confidence in USB boot as a recovery mechanism

Interesting to know; the article mentioned buggy Excel, but not PPP. The words " But the really big news is that now - finally - this open-source suite offers full compatibility with files created using Microsoft's Office 2007" seem to fall somewhat short of reality!

No worries - I didn't know you could do the latter until you posted; I'm glad you did. That's the whole interesting thing with this stuff - so many different ways of doing things.

Out of interest ('cos I know you're the experimental kind ) you could try the pendrivelinux method - it's just as straightforward - you just need to run the install exe, copy the Linux recovery iso and alter the grub menu text file. When I get chance in a couple of days time (and I have another USB to hand) I'll be trying the UNetbootin approach on mine. I'd be curious to know if they behave differently.

As you have correctly stated, people that can't access this option via the BIOS boot settings may well be able to do so via the BIOS boot menu. And that's fine. However other people may be able to access this option via the settings and find that they prefer to do that. And that's equally fine. This thread is simply a way of conveying the options available to people.

Okay so that was enforced by the lack of a BIOS settings option. If you are able to boot using either mechanism then it's just down to user choice as to which mechanism they employ.

If you can boot by changing the BIOS settings, what are you suggesting is the disadvantage of altering the boot sequence?

For what it's worth, using the method outlined in the first post produces a drive recognised on my netbook as USB HDD. I take it when you see the BIOS menu (I'm assuming this is what your F12 key raises) you don't see your USB flash drive listed at all? Having sorted out the BIOS boot menu key, I can now boot via either that or by BIOS settings, where the only things I have ahead of the actual HDD are USB CD and USB HDD. But then I'm not using the UNetbootin method.

Me too ... maybe some have Though I suspect the mechanism that I found allows you to boot from multiple isos from the grub menu (I haven't looked at the Macrium post yet) ... which is just a bit of a bonus. If I understand your post correctly, I believe I can do both from the same menu. I could re-sequence the available boot items, but I could also add into that mix other options that weren't part of that sequence. Edited to add: I had misunderstood. And I've now found the BIOS boot menu I see what you mean. In fact that method is discussed in the article I mentioned originally too; although I happened to resolve it by changing the BIOS boot settings. Many thanks for the info Anomaly.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/13/openoffice_review/

AWESOME game ... brilliant comeback from Wales but Scotland really did snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

If you have a spare USB there's a sample ISO (memory test) on the initial install. So once you have run the 'install' against your USB stick that's taken care of as a 'test' USB. Just a case then of seeing whether the machine will boot off the USB. I think that must be BIOS dependent so I'm guessing that the newer the machine the more likely it is to support it. So for the netbook users, which is what this experiment was particularly aimed at, most should be okay.

No I hadn't ... just a case of shuffling the BIOS settings to get the machine to boot from USB. This post is kinda starter for ten ... like everything else recovery-wise it needs to be tried out on your own machine. Most users will be quite happy doing a restore from a CD boot.

For the curious ... I use Reflect on my netbook, which of course has no optical drive. Whilst I have an external USB DVD drive I don't carry it out and about. I started messing around with the notion of a Macrium system restore that didn't require an optical drive. After following this article ... http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple...-multiboot-usb/ ... I now have a USB memory stick loaded with several iso images for bootable recovery CDs, including the Reflect Linux iso image. I can now boot my netbook from the USB stick and happily restore my system partition Reflect image from my data partition ... which is rather nice I imagine most netbooks come with their own restore utilitity on a recovery partition (this one does), but I'd prefer to stick with Reflect. Note that not all isos that you might want to use may boot properly - I'm still experimenting at this stage. Certainly the Reflect Linux one is fine. Edited to add: Check out Anomaly's post below which gives a link to this Macrium-specific method for creating a USB boot stick ... http://www.macrium.com/blog/2008/09/23/How...uxUSBStick.aspx

The mother of one of my colleagues was hit by this scam about a year ago. Fortunately she mentioned it to her daughter who told her to have nothing to do with them. It wasn't so much tech support as a sales pitch ... 'we know you've got problems on your PC ... let us sort it out ... for a small fee'! They harassed a little initially, but once they realised she wasn't going to bite they left her alone. It's one of those things where the unwary and the less PC savvy can get caught out.

MBR has been my thought. But I agree I thought Reflect would have dealt with it. What I didn't realise was that Reflect doesn't actually need a partition, it can create its own, so there seems even less reason for failure. But that does seen to point more towards the MBR. I thought Reflect would have handled that because it backs it up in the first place. Unless it's physically damaged there's no reason why Reflect shouldn't be able to restore. Whether it can at the moment is obviously down to the software. The only obvious reason I can think of why it shouldn't in this case is restoring into a partition that's too small, but that didn't seem to be the case. But the error message seems more esoteric than that. The only people who can definitively tell us are Macrium, if they were interested enough to take it up. I tried to find the OPs post on their forums for more detail on their response, but couldn't find anything.