Imaging with free Macrium

WHS, just wanted to say thanks again for posting a really valuable download in that win pe. it has literally saved my butt a couple times now. what a great difference from the linux recovery for macrium. and i have renamed my drives and partitions in each so they are sooooo easy to pick out now...no mistakes makes for a happy computer.

What if I have raid 0 and need to load specific drivers for windows to be installed? How do I make an image in that case?

Best to integrate your raid drivers to the pe media.

can you please explain how to do that? i just learned of this software this morning

It is easy.

You can use free version of PowerIso to make it even easier

Just click the Download Now button to get the free ( unregistered) version.

http://www.poweriso.com/


a) Pick up whs iso with poweriso - look in the souces folder, rt click boot.wim and copy (extract ) boot.wim onto your hard drive.

So you have c:\boot.wim

b) Use dism ( which you have built in to win7 ) to mount the boot.wim into any empty folder.

Make a folder on your drive called e.g. mount - so you have c:\mount

At command prompt, type this

DISM /MOUNT-WIM /WIMFILE:c:\boot.wim /INDEX:1 /MOUNTDIR:c:\mount

c) Use dism to integrate the raid drivers ( NOTE your drivers must be the same bit version as the wim - I think whs has done 64 bit? - and they must be in .inf format - you cannot integrate any kind of .exe . If they coma as .exe , you will have to extract it.)

Put the drivers in folder called e.g. c:\raiddrivers

Tell dism to integrate all the .inf files it finds in that folder like this:

DISM /IMAGE:c:\mount /ADD-DRIVER /DRIVER:c:\raiddrivers /RECURSE

d) Unmount the wim with /commit to save the changes

DISM /UNMOUNT-WIM /MOUNTDIR:c:\mount /COMMIT


e ) pick up whs iso with poweriso again , rt click the boot.wim in sources folder and DELETE. Click the add file button, browse to your updated c:\boot.wim - poweriso will pop that in the iso sources folder.

Click Save As and give it name. Anything you like - e.g. Mynew.iso

Might take you 10 mins the first time you try it.

Tick custom when installing poweriso to avoid the toolbar





Pretty straightforward isn't it?

can i not complete any of this by simply using Macrium Reflect? I would rather not use any other 3rd party software as this is sounding very complex... can it not simply be done in the program im currently using?

It is not complex - very very simple.

I think the paid version of reflect will do exactly the same thing for you. But you need to download a HUGE thing called WAIK from MS - it is free - but bloody enormous.

I don't know if the free macrium will do all that.

The advantage of doing it yourself is that you can put newer versions in - use the same wim - when mounted, just replace the files in c:\mount\program files\Macrium , with the new ones that you just installed.

No need to download the humungous WAIK from MS.