Good day to you all.

I have been using Macrium for the past 14 months and have been very pleased with it. Never encountered any problems up to and including the 14th of July.
However, I now seem to be now having a problem that is stopping me from making an image of my drives.

On the 24th of July I ran my backup and it failed with the following error.
Cluster Run Error. Unused cluster found in cluster run - Error code = 10. Please run 'chkdsk /r'

Though there is no issue with my computer that I am aware of, I ran 'chkdsk /r' as recommended and left my computer doing it's thing overnight.
Next morning my computer had booted up and everything was fine to my knowledge. I couldn't run my backup again at that point as I had other things to do. It would just have to wait until I had the time.

So finding the time yesterday, I tried to make an image of my drives and once again I received the same error. Thought to myself maybe I had better try creating a new backup to see if that made a difference. Unfortunately not, same error report.
I'm kind of stumped now as to how I can once again have Macrium working as it was before this problem arose. Any advice on how I can achieve this would be very much appreciated.


I'm using Macrium Reflect Home Edition v6.3.1835
Windows 10 Home. Build 15063.540

Assuming you ran chkdsk c: /r on your C drive, it's possible that the cluster error is being detected on a different partition. Try the following:

1. Open Command Prompt and enter "diskpart".  Accept the elevation prompt if you see one.
2. Enter "list disk" to list the disks that diskpart sees.  Find the one corresponding to the hard drive of which you're capturing images.  It will probably be #0.
3. Enter "select disk x", substituting the number you found above for x.
4. Enter "list partition". This will list the partitions on that disk.  If you see a partition listed as "Reserved", you can ignore it since that's unformatted space, and you can also ignore the Primary partition(s) since those would be your C drive and any other partitions you have that would already have a drive letter.  However, you should at least see a Recovery partition and possibly a System partition if your system uses UEFI booting. Note the numbers of those partitions.
5. For each of those other partitions, type "select partition x", substituting the appropriate partition number, and then type "assign".  That will give those normally hidden partitions a drive letter.  They'll go back to being hidden after you reboot, by the way.

When you're finished assigning these drive letters, type "exit" to close Diskpart, and then back in Command Prompt, enter "chkdsk x: /r", substituting the assigned drive letters for x.  Run that for each of the partitions to which you assigned drive letters.

Thank you for that.

I see that following your steps up to stage 4. I can see 5 partitions
Partition ### Type     Size  Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1  System     260 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2  Reserved    16 MB 261 MB
Partition 3  Primary    1848 GB 277 MB
Partition 4  Recovery    881 MB 1848 GB
Partition 5  Primary     13 GB 1849 GB

So step 5 will be to assign each one a drive letter, then run "chkdsk x: /r" on each one.
I guess that is what shall fill my time  tomorrow evening.

Should I worry if the problem is on the recovery partition?

Thank you I shall report how things go.

You want to assign letters to Partitions 1 and 4, as well as 5 unless you already see a drive letter assigned to that, and then run CHKDSK /R on all 3 of those. If the problem is fixable, then it doesn't really matter where it was.  If it's not fixable, then the System and Recovery partitions can both be recreated pretty easily if needed.  Even without Reflect, there are native Microsoft tools to do so, but with Reflect it's even easier, and since it's very likely that neither of those partitions has changed recently, even a reasonably recent Reflect backup of those partitions could be used to restore them. You would just need to do a NON-quick format of those partitions so that bad sectors are marked as unusable, and then restore the data.  If the problem lies in Partition 5, that seems pretty small, so you could probably back up whatever is on it and then recreate the partition and restore the data.

One further idea: If chkdsk /r won't run within your live Windows environment on those partitions, then boot into your Reflect Rescue Media.  It has a button to open Command Prompt in its taskbar, and diskpart is available there as well.  I'm fairly sure that chkdsk is as well, but I can't remember for certain.  But if it is, that would be the easiest way to access those partitions, in fact you might even find that some of them are already assigned drive letters in Rescue without manual effort.

Thanks for the additional info.
Now if all goes to plan, I will get it done this evening.

Happy to report that worked like a charm and Macrium is once again imaging my drives.
Thank you once again jphughan for your help.

Excellent!  Did CHKDSK reveal which volume had the issue?

It did pause a for a good few seconds when checking partition 4 the recovery partition. I can only guess that there was something amiss there.

I'm doing this right now.  On one partition, the following was returned:

C:\>chkdsk d: /r
The type of the file system is FAT32.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Chkdsk may run if this volume is dismounted first.
ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID.
Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N) y
Volume dismounted. All opened handles to this volume are now invalid.
Volume SYSTEM created 13-May-19 12:04 AM
Volume Serial Number is 9684-4EC3
Windows is verifying files and folders...
\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi first allocation unit is not valid. The entry will be truncated.
File and folder verification is complete.
Convert lost chains to files (Y/N)? y
24576 bytes in 1 recovered files.
Windows is verifying free space...
Free space verification is complete.

Windows has made corrections to the file system.
No further action is required.

100,663,296 bytes total disk space.
  164,864 bytes in 8 hidden files.
   54,272 bytes in 48 folders.
 29,022,208 bytes in 140 files.
 71,420,928 bytes available on disk.

   1,024 bytes in each allocation unit.
   98,304 total allocation units on disk.
   69,747 allocation units available on disk.