So... I am a VERY long time customer of Macrium.  I have periodically used the option to mount a recovery image and pull files from it, which I love.  I have never had to actually use it to recover a system - until now!

I built a new PC a few months ago with dual (non-raid thank God) M.2 SSD drives.  One has failed, and it is of course the Windows partition.  I am picking up a new SSD drive later today, and so I thought I would read through the process of doing the restore.  I discovered a rather alarming issue that I am really hoping there is a work-around for!  I have periodically made updates to the Rescue Media, which is on a 8GB USB stick.  I did boot this a few times in the past after updating it to make sure it would boot with my UEFI enabled BIOS (ASUS RIVBE).  The problem is that when I put together the new machine I made a new Rescue Media for the OLD machine by mistake!  Apparently I was not paying attention, so I never created one for the the new machine which is radically different (AMD instead of Intel, different motherboard, SSD drives, etc.)

So, the question I have to ask is: is it possible to restore a backup on to the new machine when I did not create the Rescue Media on that machine?  I am guessing that maybe worst case is that I would have to format the drive, install Windows, and then install Macrium again and then create a new Rescue Media?  It would be great if the Rescue Media from my old machine could be used, but it seems that there are drivers and such that are installed.

I am hoping to get some words of wisdom on this - it's been a horrible day because the failure occurred literally minutes away from starting the monthly backup - so I will lose 1 month of changes anyways.  I guess it could have failed in the middle of the backup too.  A loss is a loss though. 

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

It may be possible.  Boot the recovery media on the new one and look to see if it actually SEES the drives, if it sees the drives then you are good, it should work.  If it does NOT see the drives then you are stuck . . . for a while.  With the new NVME drives there is some issue with the drivers, if they are straight SATA drives not so much.  

What I would do is quickly install Windows to the NEW PC on the NEW drive, don't bother updating it all, just get the drivers you need to see the drives and get the OS up and running. Then install Macrium Reflect.  You may run into a snag here if you use a paid licensed version, as it's already been activated on the OLD OS, the proper thing to do is to release the license from the OLD before installing it to the new.  But since your drive is failed you can't do that. If this is the case you can either contact MRs licensing team and ask the old license be released, or you could just install the FREE version of MR to use for this recovery.  If you have a license you will be missing a few features, hopefully you won't need them.  If you have the FREE MR and not paid version to begin with just disregard.

Create your recovery media on the NEW OS on the NEW drive on the NEW machine.  Test it to be sure it sees the drives.  Then do your restore.  If you released the MR license you will likely have an  issue with the restored OS's instance of MR at some point, it will unlicense itself.  You may have to contact MR licensing and have them release it again to reapply the license on the recovered OS.  So, all in all it may just be easier to use the Macrium Free version for this intermediate step with the temp Windows. Again, if not using the licensed version like HOME then disregard.

Be sure to recreate your MR recovery media on this NEW old instance of your recovered OS.  Also apply it to the Windows Boot Menu, this way you can use it directly from the OS disk if you should ever need to recover again and the disk is still working, like when you recover files as you mentioned. 

If the old PC’s Rescue Media media was built on a relatively new WinPE/RE kernel, such as 10 or 11, then chances are you will be fine, especially since you’re not trying to use network locations or RAID storage controllers, so your driver needs should be minimal and covered by the native driver support available from the built-in driver library. The WinPE/RE version is displayed in the Rescue environment title bar along the very top of the interface.

And as Rootman said, if your “foreign” Rescue Media boots and can see all devices it needs to see for you to perform the restore, then you’re good to go.

If not, you can either manually provide drivers to the Rescue environment under the Restore > View Unsupported Devices menu if you can find the appropriate drivers and copy them onto a flash drive, or else yes you can temporarily install Windows and Reflect on the new system for the sole purpose of building Rescue Media that would automatically incorporate the necessary drivers.

But fyi it’s not uncommon at all to use “foreign” Rescue Media, in fact some business IT use cases that Macrium expressly supports entail doing exactly that, which is why there are ways to provide supplemental drivers and even a Drivers folder on the Rescue Media with various subfolders into which you can copy additional drivers that will auto-load if needed. I myself have a few home PCs but only build Reacie Media on one PC, but I have drivers relevant to all PCs in that single PC’s staging folder, and thus any Rescue Media created on that one PC has the necessary drivers for all of my home PCs.

In my case, I had a Rescue Media built on one Dell XPS model without an SSD in it.  When I got a newer Dell XPS with an SSD, I tried booting the old XPS Rescue Media to image the device before first start of Windows.  Reflect didn't recognize the SSD in the new PC.  I had to start Windows and configure it enough to install Reflect and create new Rescue Media.  That newly created Rescue Media recognized my SSD.


Since you're talking about replacing SSD's here, your mileage may vary.  However, since you already had Rescue Media created on a PC with an SSD in it, I am guessing, then you probably won't encounter the same problem I did.  So, the answer is the Rescue Media may work, but it may not.


I am also guessing, in my case, my problem was I had created WinRE based Rescue Media.  As I understand it,, WinRE Rescue Media is "tailored" to the PC it's created on by using local WinRE files on the PC.  If I had used WinPE based media, I might have avoided the issue since the WinPE is a static base based on what you download to use.  That old PC had an SSD so the WinRE may not have had drivers for SSD's in it.  Just a theory.

Thank you all for your responses.  I got the new M.2 SSD drive today and I am formatting it/testing it on an external M.2 USB device.  I want to make sure there is nothing wrong with the SSD before I go through this whole process.  I don't mind buying another license to solve this issue.  My license support expired June 22nd, 2022 anyways.

A brief history on the machine changes in case someone in the future reads this (I will add the conclusion once this is resolved too)...

Original machine is a Windows 10 Pro, ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Black Edition motherboard, 32GB of RAM, 4930K CPU.  Samsung 2.5" 1TB EVO 840 SSD (and misc drives).
New machine is Windows 10 Pro.  Gigabyte X570S Aorus Master motherboard, 32GB of RAM, 5900X CPU.  Dual Aorus 1TB GEN 4 PCie M.2 drives (non-raid).

My original machine's video cards (dual 780ti) started failing and the machine was 8 years old, so I built this new one - which has been flawless until the SSD just flat failed yesterday.   There was no warning.  The machine was working and I turned around to find the machine at the BIOS screen.  Checking the BIOS showed the SSD drive was not found in the M.2 slot.  I swapped slot positions (there are 4) of the 2 SSD drives and the slots all work.  The bad SSD also does not show up when put into the external USB device I have (portable backup device using a single M.2 SSD).  I tried all of the tricks to get it to come back to life even for a short period of time to no avail.  I have heard stories about SSD drives failing, but after several years with the Samsung EVO drives working with zero issues I was really surprised to have this issue.  I do full system backups about once a month and all documents (source code, engineering files, etc.) every couple of days.

I will report back with the outcome.