Macrium Image Backup & Dual Boot Configurations.

Thanks for the detailed instructions Greg. I will attempt this soon as it seems to keep things much simpler for backing up and restoring. I do hope that running these windows repairs on the operating system installations will preserve (with the exception of anything boot related obviously) my current settings, updates, programs and customisations and not take it back to the point of a fresh pre-service pack 1 W7 install?

That might be a silly question but I have never used this repair feature before. I have always just reinstalled both operating systems to the dual boot config I have now. Very time consuming.

You can make a back image with macrium pe disc - not with macrium linux disc

alan10 said:

I think this statement to be false
"I realise Macrium doesn’t support “cold-imaging” so the backup has to be performed from inside the operating system."

...I plugged in the Macrium P.E. Boot recovery disc and used its option to create an image.

Then I used the Boot Disc to restore from the good image...

Interesting. I thought even the pro version of Macrium didn't support that way of imaging, but only inside the OS. I am not sure if Hiren's Boot CD effectivly gives me the Macrium Windows PE feature or if there are drawbacks. Anyone tried it?

Macrium users - Hirens boot CD

MrJWilson said:

Thanks for the detailed instructions Greg. I will attempt this soon as it seems to keep things much simpler for backing up and restoring. I do hope that running these windows repairs on the operating system installations will preserve (with the exception of anything boot related obviously) my current settings, updates, programs and customisations and not take it back to the point of a fresh pre-service pack 1 W7 install?

That might be a silly question but I have never used this repair feature before. I have always just reinstalled both operating systems to the dual boot config I have now. Very time consuming.

Startup Repair only repair or writes the System boot files to the target partition, nothing in the OS is affected.

Be sure to back up your files first, and a Win7 backup image, any time you do repairs or repartitioning.

When the Acronis forums were in Wilders I found one experienced Guru that advised :-
An image should always be validated before using it;
The HDD drivers on the Boot CD may be incompatible with the HDD and unable to restore a partition;
Even a fully restored partition may fail to be un-bootable, so he preferred to use two HDD so that if he had the option to swap to the other working HDD.

It was certainly my experience with Acronis that the Linux drivers were very bad at reading the image files on a NTFS partition. I found that restoring C:\ to a NTFS partition was 3 times faster if the image files were held in FAT32 partitions rather than NTFS.

I have no such concern with the Macrium Windows PE Boot Disc.

My secondary HDD has one partition for image files, and space in which I restored an image of C:\ before I risked losing everything with an over-write of C:\ at the start of my first attempt restoring an image.
I also ensured that I had two separate validated image files on different HDD before I ever took the plunge and restored an image to C:\.

I am now much more relaxed and when an image is created it is automatically validated,
and should I ever need to restore it I assume it is still valid and nothing will go wrong,
knowing that if the image file has been corrupted I can fall back to the previous day's image.

whs said:

I use free Macrium and frequently image several partitions together. For Macrium it does not really matter what is inside the partition. You can very well image system partition2 from system1. You can also image them seperatly with or without the data partitions appended.

But when it comes to restoring, you have to restore each partition seperately. And that is a good thing because it is unlikely that all partitios go down at the same time.

The active 100MB partition you have to image only once and usually you do not restore it (unless the disk breaks and you have to migrate to a new disk). The MBR you never touch. If that breaks, you rebuild it with appropriate tools.

PS: I think what Greg suggests is the best setup. I was using that for a long time running Win7 and Vista on the same system.

Here is a Macrium tutorial I put together a while ago: Imaging with free Macrium

I have been reading the post you linked and have just a few questions.

In the event both operating systems were damaged for whatever reason, and I wanted to restore only one of the operating systems I had backed up with Macrium, and then do a fresh Windows 7 install of the second operating system (to dual boot), what would this involve and would this be complicated to do?

Would it be the case that I restore just the one operating system from the image backup with Linux rescue disc, delete the corrupted second operating system partition, run Win 7 system repair three times on the Macrium restored OS image, effectivley giving me a single boot system, and then install the second fresh Win 7, which would create a new system reserved partition and MBR?

I hope I have been clear with what I am trying to ask.

J.

You shouldn't need to do all that.

You can restore an image with any of the decent imaging apps. to unallocated space, if you like.

It should boot up straightaway.

Only if you had a separate system partition - e'g' one of those 100mb things - then yes, you can mark the restored image active and run startup repair a couple of times.