I'm confused with what were attempting to do.

I noted the various sizes of the backups as well
but I followed your instructions you first gave me
to the letter (I have all them saved as screenshots)
and they all went smoothly. I usually make the comments
you refer to whenever I create a system restore point but I
will make it a point to add them to the Mrimgs from now on.

So which mrimg from the 8500 do you think is best to clone?
I assume that is going to be our first step. I went back to take
a look at the 8500 Mrimgs and all the recent mrimgs are about
the same size. The changes occur on early Mrimgs that I kept
'just in case' and that's the explanation of the difference in sizes.

I'm not understanding exactly what you want me to do with
the 780? Do I use the Rescue CD or System Repair CD? Or
are you saying we need to clone a new OS onto the 780 before
any of this works? In any case I want to do the 780 before the
8500.

Here are the mrimgs for the 780 and they all are around
the same size.

https://postimg.cc/sM16GLvv

The encryption problem went away on it's own . I don't see the icon
anymore. Maybe it was just during the process that it occurs?

We can download 7Zip once we get everything back working normally.


Thoughts/suggestions?
Robert