Paragon Recovery in Windows 7 is flawed

My Windows 7 PC has a 'System Reserved' partition as well as the Windows installation partition. 'System Reserved' must be an 'Active' partition, and the Windows partition must be 'Inactive'. If these assignments are the wrong way round the system will not boot since the boot files are on the 'System Reserved' partition which the system cannot 'see' if it's not 'Active'.

Well, restoring an image with Hard Disk Manager 2010 on a Windows 7 system which has a 'System Reserved' partition does exactly that; it puts the 'Active' settings the wrong way round because, it seems, it is unable to understand that a 'System Reserved' partition on Windows 7 must ALWAYS be set as the active partition.

Luckily I realised what the problem was and corrected it with the partition tools on the HDM boot disk, but I can well imagine there being some HDM users in a similar scenario as mine not having a clue on how to fix the "Boot Manager Missing" error.

HDM 2010 is "Windows 7 compatible" yes, but not if your particular installation has a 'System Reserved' partition. Obviously Paragon didn't test it in this scenario, which is a gaping oversight on their part.

If it's any consolation, Macrium Reflect restore does exactly the same thing.

I've just tried Acronis True Image 2010 on the same system. Created a backup image which included both partitions and then did a restore from it. No problem whatsoever, it respected and preserved the original 'Active' & 'Inactive' assignments for each partition.

Needless to say, Acronis True Image is now the only Backup & Recovery utility that I will be using in future.

 

Paragon doesn't mark my restored o/s partitions as Active.

Neither does Macrium - unless you tell it to.