Solved Macrium Reflect Version 7 problem

I have been using a paid for version of Macrium Reflect 7 for years on a Windows 10 machine. Yesterday, I moved the license over to my new Windows 11 machine and I also imported the backup definition file which I had set to trigger automatically, as a differential type, every night and then shut down the machine when finished.

I then did an initial backup manually yesterday which worked OK, but this morning I discovered that the overnight scheduled backup failed. The log entry says "Backup Aborted! - Error reading Image file"

I thought there might be an issue with the imported Windows 10 definition file, so I have created a new one. After the initial manual backup completed again just now, I thought I would try a dummy run of the schedule which I set to start a few minutes ago. The backup triggered OK, but nothing else happened. I opened up Macrium, checked the log and again I see this " Backup Aborted! - Error reading Image file" error.

The backup type has always been set to Differential. The initial backup image is fully readable in Restore mode.

My support with Macrium has long expired. Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Is Version 7 maybe not fully compatible with Windows 11?

Unsure myself...I moved to v8 a long time ago. What I can find is it seems v7 will work on Win11, at least the earlier versions of 11. And FYI if you don't find an answer here you can register with the Macrium user forums and get other user inputs/help.

"Error reading Image file" suggests that an area of disk that the Image file has been written to is damaged, thus unreadable to Reflect and it bails out.

satrow said:

"Error reading Image file" suggests that an area of disk that the Image file has been written to is damaged, thus unreadable to Reflect and it bails out.

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Thanks. Yes, I was thinking something similar. I am now in the process of moving the backup file to different media and will try again from there.

rigsby said:

moving the backup file to different media

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Which would lead to the same error, if that's where the damaged area/sector is...

Perhaps checking the disk (not CHKDSK, it can't repair and might remove any chance of it) first to confirm, or 'fix' the problem?

Do a check disk on the destination drive.

Right click on the disk
Properties->Tools->check

If the Image itself is reading an error from within Macrium you can "verify" the image for integrity and also an option to attempt to repair. Although I am using v8 Home.

@satrow @BamaInArk @FDretired

I've run a chkdsk on the drive (a 1tb USB key) and kit suggests no errors, but it also says Access Denied. Should I have formatted it as NTFS instead of the default exFAT?

E: probably isn't the drive with the read failing, it's the drive being written to?

satrow said:

E: probably isn't the drive with the read failing, it's the drive being written to?

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Yes E: is the drive being written to. However, I've just done another small backup to a different drive (formatted as exFAT) and then tried the schedule and it has worked fine. So maybe it's some kind of issue with the USB key in E:

rigsby said:

So maybe it's some kind of issue with the USB key in E:

Click to expand...

Yes, perhaps the read failing refers to the Verification?

Thanks all. I'm now making a full image backup using the new media. If that works OK on the schedule, I'll close this thread as solved.

All OK now. It was obviously a dodgy USB key . Thanks all for your time & trouble.