Dennis D cheers for the advice,I have now formatted the hard drive and installed macrium and verified !
I`m leaving that alone now until such time i get a problem,but hopefully will not need it !
one last question the other back up files that i already had (i have put into the same drive as back up),but has Macrium reflect in effect made these files redundant ??
Many thanks again for your help...
Fluffy
Hi Fluff.
Just to double check. Are you saying that you've made an "Image" of your System Drive, C:, onto your external drive, and that you've verified that Image sucessfully?
If so, that Image, which contains all the files on your System Drive at the time of making it, can be mounted as a normal drive, which means you can explore it, and copy files from it.
So if you are talking about it making other back up files from your System Drive redundant, then technically the answer is yes, but I would still make them.
I make a new "Disk Image" about once a month, so that it never gets too far behind changes to my drive, which includes new software, music, photographs, and Windows Updates. But I back up my photographs and music more often than that, and it isn't a bad idea to have more than one back up of personal stuff you couldn't replace.
To access files in that back up Image, you simply right click it, and you should have a bold print "Explore Image..." item in the context menu.
Select that, and allow Macrium to assign a drive letter to it, and then you'll find a "new" drive in your "My Computer" window.
You can then explore and copy stuff from that new drive as you would a normal drive. When you close down or reboot your PC, that drive disappears.
The only other thing I would advise, is to place the Macrium Rescue CD in your drive and boot with it. Navigate as far as selecting your backup Image, but not as far as starting the process, to make sure that the Rescue CD actually works.
If you want more info on that, I'll do it with my Rescue CD, and give you a couple of pictures of how the process looks.