Testing an emergency boot CD

rkl122 · 30 Oct 2014

I made a WinPE emergency disk (from EaseUS-ToDo Backup free ver. 7). I thought I'd test that it actually works before stowing it away. On restart, the CD drive spins, but the boot appears perfectly normal - gives me my normal desktop. I know my Bios is set to look at the optical drives first, and I tried it a second time using F12 and explicitly choosing the CD drive to boot from. Same result.

So my question is: how do I know that the disc actually works? Is there another way to test it?

Thx, Ron

whs · 30 Oct 2014

You apparently did not boot from the CD. When the boot starts and the scree is black, watch for a little message on the top left that says:"Press any key". Then press the space bar. If you don't do that, the boot defaults to your inatalled OS.

I would also recommend to make the test with a little 2GB test partition that you populate with some random data. That is a lot faster than using your C partition and you do not run the risk to damage anything.

rkl122 · 30 Oct 2014

Thank you. Didn't see the upper left prompt until I did a cold boot. I guess "Restart" is a warm boot and bypasses the bios boot device sequence (?).

BTW, what comes up is the (EaseUS ToDo) backup interface (including options to restore backups that it must have read from the C drive). But no Windows interface, no file explorer. (When I closed the ToDo window, the system simply rebooted from C drive.) I thought an emergency disk is supposed to boot to a sorta safe mode Windows. Or at least a Windows recovery environment. Guess I better make a Windows system repair disc too.

Thx for the response. -Ron

Edit - Have never made my own partition. Didn't want to learn about that now, but I gather you're saying these emergency disks can write to the C drive even without an overt corrective option being chosen by the user? Yikes.

whs · 30 Oct 2014

I don't use this program for imaging. I use free Macrium. If you want to try it, download the Macrium WinPE .iso from my One Drive and burn it to CD. With that you can create images and recover from images. Here is how.

Creating a little test partition is no rocket science. Just shrink 2GBs from any existing partition and make a new partition in that space. All that can be done in Disk Management. Note that in Disk management all the numbers are in MBs.

SIW2 · 30 Oct 2014

BTW, what comes up is the (EaseUS ToDo) backup interface (including options to restore backups that it must have read from the C drive). But no Windows interface, no file explorer.

Yes, that is what is supposed to happen. Most of those kind of things are similar. The program interface is the pe shell. If you close the shell, the machine reboots.

None of them have full windows explorer. Mostly just the program itself, some also give access to command prompt,and perhaps a 3rd party file explorer thing at best.

Might have look and see if I can make one for you.

Aomei have an experimental pe maker which does include windows explorer, but it is pretty rudimentary still. It is really more like a beta version http://www.aomeitech.com/pe-builder.html

I have worked with them quite a bit to get a better one going. Not sure how much of my stuff they have been able to include as yet.

I will test the 1.2 version and see how far they have got.

SIW2 · 30 Oct 2014

You needn't bother testing the Aomei thing, it still needs a lot of work. They are going about it completetly the wrong way.

I have a much better one ready, it will be good for aomei backupper, macrium, and paragon. ( Wiil link to it shortly).

Will have a look at including Easeus Todo.

rkl122 · 30 Oct 2014

Thank you both. Looks like there's a Macrium Free update as recent as today :)

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

I will look into these options. Thx again, Ron

SIW2 · 30 Oct 2014

Just tested my pe maker, working great. Haven't included Todo yet, but it will work with aomei backupper, macrium, or paragon.

Will post it up in a few mins.

SIW2 · 30 Oct 2014

Whichever imaging program you use, you will also want a partition manger.

Suggest you install one of these:

Free Partition Manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard

OR

Free Partition Manager for Window PC | MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition

AND

Recover deleted files, Partition manager and Windows backup - PartitionGuru

Don't worry it says pro version - the bits you want work free.

SIW2 · 30 Oct 2014

Here:file is called A25.zip

https://www.dropbox.com/s/w3jpgnnzvd1xbab/A25.zip?dl=0

Unzip it onto your drive, so you have C:\A25

Then just rt click and run as admin on runmeasadmin.cmd.