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Question

Messed up and reinstalled win 7. Should I restore image?

Sep 24, 2015 4:53PM PDT

Hi. I hope you can help me- the story's a bit long.
I'm running windows 7 on my Ava PC and some older games failed to run after a windows update. I did a system restore On reccommendation here which fixed the problem, at least until the next update.
I did another system restore but after hours, the screen and clock were frozen,so I powered off. The system would not power up at all. I bought a PSU tester and it checked out fine. I brought it to my local repair shop and they found the problem was loose RAM. It powered up fine, but wouldn't boot, requesting a win 7 repair disk (which I don't have).
I religiously make back ups with Acronis True Image. I tried restoring the c drive but it still wouldn't boot. I brought it back to the shop and he pulled data off the c drive (ssd where the OS is), reinstalled win 7 and put the data back on c.

I really hate the idea of DL'ing and reinstalling from disk the myriad of aps and games I had. Also, I expect my game saves are gone and my heavily modded Skyrim will need to be started from scratch.

Now the system is working, will I mess it up by restoring the saved image I have on my external drive? Should I (can I) get a win 7 disk? Why didn't restoring the image fail to let the system boot?

Any advice/suggestions are welcome.

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
Wow !
Sep 24, 2015 8:45PM PDT

I can't imagine why you wouldn't create a set of system image disc's

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Answer
I never had a good experience with Acronis True Image.
Sep 24, 2015 4:59PM PDT

That's why I've been using the free Easeus Todo Backup Free since Windows 8 came out. Before that I used Norton Ghost, but good old Symantec bought Ghost and in their great wisdom put it out to pasture.
`
Good luck.

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Answer
I've used Acronis many times to
Sep 25, 2015 4:53AM PDT

clone drives but never did a restore from a backup.