Windows 7: A little help with Macrium, please

I want to do a system image with Macrium. Could someone help with what I need to image. The 'c' drive or something else with it - the 100mb partion ??
The aim is to get back to a working system in case of failure.
I'm adding Macrium pic and disk management.

Please note: my c drive is Logical - does this make any difference?

I use Acronis for backups, and I do full hard drive backups of all partitions, not just the "C" partition. If you have, for example, a recovery partition and a diagnostic partition (as Dell and some other PC's vendors do) those need to be backed up too. If you just backup the "C" drive partition and have a hard drive failure and have to replace the drive with a new hard drive, you can restore the "C" partition to the new hard drive but you have lost any other partition.

I would do the same with this program, backup all partitions with this program to the separate hard drive (D) that I assume you will be using for backups.

I agree do a full HD image if you can

Hi ken,

It is ok to have your boot drive as a logical drive, only the system partition needs to be a primary.

As you have the 100mb system partition, image it as well.

Make 2 separate images , one of your C partition and the other of your 100mb partition.

Or you can image them both at once - up to you.

You can make a new image of your C partition every week or so to keep it up to date.

No need to keep making new images of the 100 mb partition.

The other 2 are oem partitions put there by the manufacturer essentially to manage and recover your system to factory state.

If you have the time, the space and the inclination you can image those as well if you like. I wouldn't bother because I would have no interest in restoring to factory state. You may feel differently. If you do , then again you only need to image those once - they shouldn't change.

Making your own images with Macrium is much better than using the manufacturer restore program.

Hope it helps.

As SIW2 says, it is prudent to image C and the System Reserved partition which contains the MBR. Usually, nothing should happen to the system reserved partition, but one never knows. Pay attention the day you recover. For the recovery of C, you must not restore the MBR nor must you mark that partition as active. That is what you would do for the system reserved partition which you have to recover independently in case it is damaged - but in most cases that will not be neccessary.
You might want to have a look at my Macrium Tutorial ( Imaging with free Macrium ) which explains some of those things in more detail.

Thanks to everyone for the advice. Much appreciated.

WHS: I've watched your video tutorial twice and it was the warning at the top of that page that prompted this thread.

I'm still a little confused over the restoration of C with regard to the MBR.

I understand that I should not restore the MBR when restoring C, but would I get the option since it isn't on C ?

Or are you referring to a situation where I would have to restore both?

I realize it would probably become clear if I had to do it - hope I don't have to!

1, If you watch the part of the video that describes the restoration, you will come to this picture (see below) where it says: "Do not replace". If you chose this option, the MBR will not be replaced. This is a generic Macrium option regardless whether the MBR is or is not in the image.

2. You will only have to restore the active partition (the small partition with the MBR), if you cannot boot after you restored C. Then you get a message like "Bootmgr missing". But that would be the rare case and should only happen if you have a physical damage on your drive.

There really isn't going to be an issue if you restore the MBR. Most of the time, it would be an unnecessary step. However, for somebody like me, I like to occassionally switch back and forth between Windows and Linux on the box. Therefore, since the MBR is replaced with each OS, it's necessary for me to restore than 100MB active system partition as well as the C drive in order for my box to ever boot again.

But if I were just imaging my C drive and one day after an update Windows would not boot...it would most likely only require me to restore the C drive to get the box working again.

Hope that makes sense.

Unfortunately that is not my experience. I learned the hard way that the restored system will not boot if you try to restore the MBR from a C image where there is no MBR. In that case you have to restore the small active partition - but this is really not neccessary in practically all cases.

I think we are talking about 2 slightly different things. In your case, you tried to restore the MBR from a backup that didn't contain an MBR....and that is simply user error and would never work.

What I am saying is that restoring your MBR is not really an issue if you do it and you don't need to. Obviously, you would be restoring it from a backup which contained it.

edit: on second thought...why not just always back up the 100MB partition. I mean it's tiny and with compression it takes no space.