Image your system with free Macrium

bigcitycat said:

LOL I am coming in here at a late date. I just backed up with macrium. I have a couple of questions. I have not tried to restore this back up. I have a dual boot system so when I backed up I selected the 100 mb NTFS partition because I hear it contains the MBR. Then I backed up the windows seven partition, as well as my Kubuntu and swap partitions. I did not backup recovery. I really wasn't sure if I needed all of these. I was able to put them all on a 14 gigabyte usb, go figure. My question is what issues if any should I expect if I try to recover my system with this setup? After reading through this thread. I really didn't see much with regards to restoring these backups.

If you watched the video, the backup scenario is part of it. There is usually no need to restore the 100MB partition (unless you have to install a brand new HDD). The 100MB partition does not contain the MBR (that is on the first 512 bytes of the HDD) but it contains the bootmgr - which in your case is probably the Linux Grub now.

The fact that you only needed 14GBs is due to the compression of the images. That corresponds to about 26 or 27GBs of real used space.

The one thing you have to watch out for is not to mark the partitions as "active" when you run the recovery. Your active partition is the 100MB partition.

bigcitycat said:

I booted the rescue cd but it just gets stuck on a blue screen that says please wait.

It says "please wait" for a bit. But if this is for very long, there is something wrong with the CD. Maybe you can burn a new one.

One other possibility is that you have a hardware configuration with which the Linux program on the CD cannot deal.

bigcitycat said:

Hmm, not sure why I am not seeing a video?

Sorry my fault. I put out 2 tutorials - one in writing and one with the video. I mixed the threads up. But here it is: Imaging with free Macrium

It was 43 gigabytes that I put on the usb. Hope that doesn't cause an issue.

The 43GBs is a high number. But it depends what the data is. If there is a lot of repetitive data, the compression can be higher. Usually I have observed a 55% ratio. But I would not worry about it.

Just burn a new CD and try that.