Macrium Reflect

Dell computer with Intel Celeron cpu, 2.0 GHz and 3.0 gb memory.

Prior to installing Windows 7 Pro I had Vista Home Premium (came preinstalled on the pc, and had not be partitioned). I had made the rescue disks was prepared to restore to factory conditions. I even had Macrium Reflect image.

Try as I might, after Vista became very unstable, I could not get factory conditions restored. Macrium image from an external hard drive took over 24 hrs to restore the image (which would not boot either).

Finally I decided to install Windows 7 Pro. That went very well and has been activated. I then partitioned the hard drive as shown below.



I have installed the latest version of the free Macrium and created a new restore disk (and checked it). I then made an image and placed that image on drive J. I am not going to put that image on an external HDD. BTW when I booted up from the restore disk Macrium does not see drive J, it sees it as drive F.

This my question: why did it take so long to restore the Macrium image (with vista) and can anyone give me an idea why after it was restored it did not actually work.

Can I reasonally expect Macrium to work since installing Win 7?

Thanks in advance

Which restore disc?

Linux or pe?

Dunno about the Linux disc , but the pe disc should show you the same drive letters you see when you are booted into windows.

Macrium is unique in doing that.

Quite useful for the average punter who only has one o/s - bit of a pain for everyone else.

I have never use that software, so far the only one worked for me was the minitool partition wizzard. While the famous Paragon and some others were quite unreliable.
The other soft that i use is Todo backup, its a very basic backingup software but it works...
I am not sure why the restoration took so long, the reason for this might have been the lack of free space on the disk which really slows down copying data from one side to another. It took much less time to restore windows 7 because it was a clean install and there was headroom on the disk to use.

Cheers!

I have used Macrium on W7 and have had no trouble restoring on a multi partition system. Restores as fast as Acronis.

If your Vista system had the same factory partitions it is possible that your MBR (Boot) was on a separate partition and may not have been backed up by Macrium?? Also, Macrium does incremental backups so you may have restored only a portion of files. Many variables and uncertain of the cause.

Macrium works fine on W7.

nenny said:

Dell computer with Intel Celeron cpu, 2.0 GHz and 3.0 gb memory.

Prior to installing Windows 7 Pro I had Vista Home Premium (came preinstalled on the pc, and had not be partitioned). I had made the rescue disks was prepared to restore to factory conditions. I even had Macrium Reflect image.

Try as I might, after Vista became very unstable, I could not get factory conditions restored. Macrium image from an external hard drive took over 24 hrs to restore the image (which would not boot either).

Finally I decided to install Windows 7 Pro. That went very well and has been activated. I then partitioned the hard drive as shown below.



I have installed the latest version of the free Macrium and created a new restore disk (and checked it). I then made an image and placed that image on drive J. I am not going to put that image on an external HDD. BTW when I booted up from the restore disk Macrium does not see drive J, it sees it as drive F.

This my question: why did it take so long to restore the Macrium image (with vista) and can anyone give me an idea why after it was restored it did not actually work.

Can I reasonally expect Macrium to work since installing Win 7?

Thanks in advance

I used Macrium 5.0 to clone my system disk on a Windows 7 Professional 64 bit PC. It worked perfectly. Drive letter remained the same. I recall something about logical partitions. Not sure, but maybe only primary partitions can be used?

Good luck, Jim

WinPE Boot CD's have better drivers than Linux.
Linux can be slower, and even be unable to perform a restore.
I found Acronis was 3 times slower using LINUX to restore a backup from an NTFS partition than a FAT32 partition on an external USB2 drive.
Under live Windows Acronis Created the backup to either NTFS or FAT32 in about the same time as LINUX took restoring from FAT32

It was common on the Wilders-Acronis forum to find posts from people that created Images that were validated,
but in the hour of need they found the Linux Boot CD had no drivers suitable for their hardware.

I learnt from their mistake and never trust a new Boot CD unless :-
I have a previous Boot CD that is proven to work with my current imaging system ;
or
I first use the Boot CD to restore to unallocated space,
and then under Windows I compare C:\ with the new restored partition using the free portable 64 bit BestSync
Download BestSync

I have just BestSync and it took 14 Seconds to compare C:\ with P:\ and identify 226 files different between them
out of 82224 files, and the changes to backup total 492.01 MB.
Those differences were not restoration errors,
but changes to file sizes and date stamps etc because Windows never stands still,
and Comodo has just updated a 200 MB Bases.cav signature database,
and I have just updated Macrium Reflect which has my full confidence.

NB One of the things I did with Windows 7 when first installed was to use its Disc Management to shrink it down to 25 GB. That left me plenty of unallocated space for experimental restorations.

It is of course possible that for some reason your restore was being done in USB1 mode instead of USB2.

I believe Macrium V5 free is now available. V4 free appears unavailable.