Windows 7: Imaging with free Macrium

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Last edited by whs; 23 Feb 2013 at 07:28 PM..

As WHS said, you are in overkill. If you image the recovery partition you also will have all the factory bloatware, trial software, and general crap, like the HP tools which do what Windows 7 already has tools for.

The simple answer is image the entire drive, it will be highly compressed and may not be more than 100GB. I have an OS image which is 9.34GB, and the OS is a bit over 20GB.

To find info on this forum, click on Search at the top and type in your query in the Standard Search (Google) field.

Find the Macrium tutorial by WHS. The MBR stores the partition structure so when you restore a recovery partition you just select the partition it belongs in (generally up the front).
If you can find the money then a little 500GB external HDD would be a good investment. I still think imaging recovery etc is a good idea but you would image your OS partition on a more regular basis.



Once you have recovery images you may want to convert your OS partition to logical and create 2 logical partitions - one OS and one data so that your OS image will always be quite small. This is something to think about down the track.

I'm going to be using the Free Edition on a Laptop, I'll update the thread since it's geared for the free version.

i know , thats why i tried to clean reinstall OS . but in case if we sell the unit to someONe who is not an IT related person, just he use to recover laptop by pressing f11 and no need for updated drivers , then this scenario will prompt me to do this action . thats it . and hey i didn't know about less image back up size, how can we make image backup of OS up to 9.34 GB or even up to 20 GB or 30GB . because i donot wanna retain myself to keep highly big image size of these OS .

well i am not so prone to start regular basis scheduled back ups of OS , not very much case sensitive .besides i have not so much important data to worry about .and thanks , i will find the threads related to user whs . and if i need help regarding concepts of master boot record MBR related to partition and back up images then i will let you know .

I've used Macrium Reflect Free repeatedly when I totally bork my Windows 7 partition on my dual-boot C: drive and it's a lifesaver.

I did have a question about how many images the Free version can save on another drive or partition. I recently had to use the latest (Dec 20 2012) image I had to restore my hard drive, and everything went well. This evening, I ran the program and saved today's drive image on another internal hard drive as I always do. When I was done, I looked in the folder and that one freshly created image was the only one there. My older three images including the Dec. 20 2012 one were gone. Vanished.

I ran Recuva with Deep Scan on that drive and came up empty. No older images at all. Very strange, so I'm wondering where the setting is in the Free version to keep images longer than 14 days, or to enable me to save more than three images. I could have sworn that at one time I had five, but maybe the latest Macrium update changed the number.

I've had several images (more than 10) stored on separate HDDs and never lost one.

As far as I know there is no limit on the number of images you can create and store. The previous images must have been removed by something else.

Well, since I had troubles saving opened spreadsheet files stored on that same hard drive, methinks the drive is starting to crap out. I guess I'd better save what I can and go drive shopping. <sighs>

Run these tests on your hard drive.

For Seagate:
Download and run Seatools on your HDD.
How to use SeaTools for Windows
Short Drive Self Test and if it passes then the Long Drive Self Test.

For WD:
Run the WD Lifeguard test on your HDD(s). Quick Test first, if it passes then run the Extended Test.
Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows

I'm pretty sure that the free version has no limit. The paid versions have a space management feature which allows you to specify how many images to keep in a particular folder or the length of time to keep an image but this can be turned off.

There is no such a Macrium restriction. I keep up to 20 images with no problems. I think your drive goes south.