Image your system with free Macrium

Yes.

Which HD do you mean? It is simple to boot it directly from your systemdrive.

It will rely on the windows bootmgr and bcd files functioning since you will add it as a boot menu option. The paid version does it that way too.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Instead putting Reflect's Recovery Disk on a separate CD or USB stick, is it possible to put it on a HDD where the images are stored? If so, how? It would be nice to not have to keep track of a separate USB stick or CD for recovery. All my images are stored on external HDDs. The ones for my notebook are on HDDs accessed through a USB 2.0 dock and the ones for my desktop are stored on HDDs that I can plug into one of two internal SATA 3.0 dock (one 2.5" and one 3.5").

Unfortunately, its not possible to have both the recovery boot files, and image on the same media.

Perhaps there isn't an automated way to do that provided by reflect program

I haven't bothered trying it with macrium , but it works fine with my other imaging programs.

SIW2 said:

Yes.

Which HD do you mean? It is simple to boot it directly from your systemdrive.

It will rely on the windows bootmgr and bcd files functioning since you will add it as a boot menu option. The paid version does it that way too.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Instead putting Reflect's Recovery Disk on a separate CD or USB stick, is it possible to put it on a HDD where the images are stored? If so, how? It would be nice to not have to keep track of a separate USB stick or CD for recovery. All my images are stored on external HDDs. The ones for my notebook are on HDDs accessed through a USB 2.0 dock and the ones for my desktop are stored on HDDs that I can plug into one of two internal SATA 3.0 dock (one 2.5" and one 3.5").

Ok, we have had a failure to communicate. Sorry! let me try again.

Right now, I keep the images for my notebook and my desktop machine's C:/ drive on 2.5" internal drives. I use a USB 2.0 dock with the notebook and a 2.5" swap bay (directly connected to an internal SATA port) on the desktop to plug the drives into when making an image (I keep the drives stored away from the computer when not using them). To restore a drive, I currently have to use a recovery CD and the HDD the image is stored on. What I'm wanting to do is have a "recovery disk" on the same HDDs the images are stored on so I don't have to keep up with a separate disk, especially with the notebook (it's case is getting a bit crowded). That way, all I have to do is plug one HDD into a dock or swap bay and go from there.

You can put the macrium wim on there easily enough. The tricky bit is booting it - if you want to keep plugging and unplugging the drive.

I will make the macrium thing and post back when I have reminded myself how they do it.

I have just installed and run Macrium Reflect free version (5.1, build 5870) for the first time using the setting to image the Windows operating system disk. I have two physical disks in my PC, a 256GB SSD for the operating system (of which I am using around 140GB at present) and a 7200rpm disk for user data. I ran a backup to the user data drive and it saved a single 80GB file to the user data disk. Right clicking this I was able to mount it and see various C drive files and folders so I assume it's copied everything (including the MBR). I specify including the MBR since before I installed my SSD the MBR was on a separate partition but it looks like now the MBR is included on the C drive since the C drive is marked (under disk management) as "System, boot page file, active, crash dump, primary partition" and there is no separate 100MB partition. Does it sound like I have copied everything necessary in the event of total disk failure and the need to fit a new SSD?

A few more questions.

(i) When I ran Macrium it did NOT ask me to create a rescue CD ROM disk. I ran it a second time and it offered to create a rescue disk with a choice of Linux or Windows PE with the caveat that the Windows PE required a 1GB download first. Linked to this thread somewhere was a disk image iso called Rescue5828 with the suggestion that I should burn it to a CD-ROM as some sort of basic version of windows that would rescue a system. Can I burn that to the disk and have a fully functioning rescue disk, or do I have to create a rescue disk that is unique to my system? What exactly is the image on the Rescue5828 and if I burn it to a CD-ROM will it restore my system, given that I am running Macrium 5870?

(ii) For belt and braces should I create a rescue disk with the Linux option AND burn the 5828 iso image? Or should I not have two versions of the resuce software on the same CD ROM disk?

(iii) When I ran Macrium I noticed that on my second internal hard drive in My Documents it had created a folder called Macrium and an 8kb xml document called My backup 25052012 (which is the name I had requested to be given to the backup - that's not the same name as the 80GB image file it created though). What is this 8kb xlm file that's now sitting in My documents, do I need it and do I need to back it up next time I run a file and folder backup of my data drive?

Many thanks for help with these queries.

Diddlededum