Macrium Reflect rescue media won't open a backup image file

I am trying to restore a backup created with the free version of Macrium reflect after a disk fail.

Rescue media was created for the PC in question (running WinXPSP3) and a backup done which produced a 15Gb image file.

When the hard disk failed, I installed a fresh drive, booted with the rescue media on a USB drive, copied the backup image to another memory stick and tried to open it with Reflect. No dice. If won't open the image, giving a not very helpful Unable to load image file message. The version of Reflect on the rescue media is 5.2, build 6515.

I can however, load the image on another PC running Reflect (version 6.2 1549), browse the folders etc no problem.

My questions:

1) Is this simply a version mismatch problem?

Chances are I:

• installed Reflect
• created rescue media
• backed up the PC
• updated reflect (as it always nags you to when you start it)
• backed up the PC again.

So I now have an image created with a later version of Relect than the one that created the rescue media.

This would seem like something that is bound to happen sometime. I don't remember being warned to re-create my rescue media when I updated Relect.

2) What are my options?

Could I mount the new drive as a second drive on another PC and restore the image to it? Or is there some migration path so that newer images can be read by older rescue media environments (like some utility that regresses the newer v6 image format to a V5-compatible one?).

Solution 1:

So I now have an image created with a later version of Relect than the one that created the rescue media.

That's more than likely the problem. Create new rescue media and try it with that.