Windows 7: Image your system with free Macrium

You are right. I overlooked the 'M' - my bad. But what is the story on C:

Btw: There is really not much you can damage by changing the size of the shadowstorage. Only drawback could be that you lose old restore points - but that is usually not a problem. You can create a new one asap.

I believe that's because I have System Protection turned off, but I'm not sure.

Right, that's probably it. But if I were you I would allow 10% of the space in C for restore points. They are not as reliable as images, but they are sometimes very handy - e.g for retrieving lost files: ShadowExplorer - Recover Lost Files and Folders.

I prefer to run my VMs from a different internal HDD (I don't have a SSD).

On my TAFE course, we often had problems with the VMs "locking up", because they were competing with the OS for HDD access (on the same HDD - the PCs only had one HDD).
It made keeping up with the lecturer's demonstrations extremely difficult.

If you have a single SSD, access "clashes" probably won't be a problem.

There is a GUI tool to for configuring your System Restore points.

• Press "Win Logo + Pause Break" or open the Start Menu, right click on "Computer" and choose "Properties"
• Click on the "System Protection" link (left side)

You can choose:

• The drives that you want to have System Restore points
• The amount of space allocated for each drive's System Restore points

Great information above, thank you lehnerus and whs.

Yesterday evening I successfully set-up my computer for dual-booting with Windows 8. However, I quickly realized that it's way too much trouble to shutdown and restart whenever I want to switch between the to operating systems, which is rather frequently. I now understand why some people opt to utilize VMs.

A couple of questions regarding Macrium and VirtualBox:

1. Can I simply image my new Windows 8 partition using Macrium before it's eliminated, and then burn it in to the VM or am I required to do a new Windows 8 installation in to the VM?

2. After the VM is set up, does the C: OS system imaging process normally include the VM guest OS as well, or is it best to complete two separate imaging jobs to keep everything separate?

1. I don't think that will work. You probably have to reinstall, but I never treid with an image.

2. Yes, when you image the host, it includes the guest

3. I just installed Win8 in VMPlayer. After years of using Virtual Box. But I had a lot of trouble with the network when vBox was installed. Maybe you want to consider VMPlayer. There is a great tutorial by Shawn: VMware Player - Install Windows 8

Point 2 is only true if the virtual disk image file is on a partition that you image.

Thanks... I was just wrapping up Shawn's tutorial on VirtualBox, but I'll have a look his VMware Player tutorial before making a decision. Are there any significant reasons to choose one over the other?

Some people, me included, have problems with video drivers with Windows 8 in VirtualBox.

So including the virtual disk image file on the same partition would make life easier when it comes to copying system images, I suppose? That's probably the route I'll take since I have plenty of room on my SSD.