Would this macrium restore experiment work??

If you have a drive which is a clone - an exact copy- of another- then you should be able to use them interchangeably.

That's what a clone is. An exact copy.

You can clone a disk with MR.
Cloning a disk - KnowledgeBase - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase
You can create disk images with MR
http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v...user_guide.pdf
- you can read about disk cloning and disk imaging - links on the left hand side.
The two are very very different.
Your first post referred to a disk image.

In simple terms, a clone is a faithfull copy of an existing drive to a new drive.

A system image is a compressed file containting details of drive that has been imaged. The primary purpose of an image is to restore original drive to state at time image was taken. However, you can restore the image to another drive which is basically like cloning but with intermediate steps.

An image is good for backups and is just a file so you can store other files on drive with backup image. You can have multiple backups at different stages.

Cloning wipes everything on target drive.

Cloning is really used when you want to replace one drive with another eg an ssd for an hdd. It is not best suited for backups.

"...t is not best suited for backups..." +1! In my experience, full images of my OS and Data partitions, including System Reserved partition, saved routinely onto external media, rather than clones being made, works better for me when a restore is in order. I've had to restore OS several times, and in doing so, the Data partition remains undisturbed.