As advised by urie, I finally deleted the sys. reserved partition on a fresh format and install and installed on C:. Went without a hitch if you follow the instructions. Both windows 7 and acronis backup and restore without a glitch even if there is no sys. reserved partition. On acronis vs versus windows 7 backup and restore: 1. acronis is much faster at backups (2-4 mins vs win 7 of 10-30 mins) and restore (4-5 mins versus 10-15 mins for win 7). 2. acronis makes much smaller backup files (50-60% of windows 7 backups). 3. I can use acronis boot cd if I only need it for backup and restore.