Image your system with free Macrium

whs, i wish i had the time to read all 23 pages of this thread...
did you give up on me on the htg forum?
also, here's my email to macrium's support:
"hello, although i'm not a registered macrium user, i'm a potential one depending on your response to my issue:
Basically, restoring an image to my new hdd is impossible due to the new hdd not appearing as an available target.
All details can be found in these threads: problem with macrium and problem with macrium « How-To Geek Forums .
It seems this particular issue already occurred, as reported 2 years ago in macrium's forum ( Macrium Support Forum - Problems Restoring - Linux boot ); now the main conclusion i retain from this latter thread is Nick's statement (last post) that "The purchased version of Reflect includes a Windows PE 2.0 rescue CD that's guaranteed to work" - if you hereby confirm that statement, i am willing to pay (do i have another choice?)...
thank you,
jmm"

kado897 said:

Macrium selects a free drive letter and also gives you the option to change it.

Okay, it's good to know that no drive letters need to be "bumped" for Macrium's temp partition.

whs said:

If the new virtual drive letter is inserted logically at the end of all the existing drive letters, no problem

That's what it does.

I never had a need for the WinPE yet. But if you have external disks attached to USB3, that may be required. The Linux recovery disk does not support USB3 yet. But I understand it will support it with the next version.

Glad to hear about the drive lettering.

I don't own any USB 3 devices yet, but certainly this will be in my future for an external HDD (that, or maybe eSATA). It begins to sound like the paid version of Macrium might be appropriate for me.

I was just reading the tutorial "SSD - INSTALL AND TRANSFER THE OPERATING SYSTEM". And there I found this note:

"Most free imaging programs cannot shrink the originating partition to fit into the usually much smaller C: partition on the SSD - even if the amount of data in that partition would fit."

If the above quote refers to free Macrium, I hope the paid for Macrium does not have this same limitation. Being a long time Ghost user, I suppose I'm spoiled by not having this worry. Whenever a HDD fails, you just do a Ghost restore from your last image to a new HDD, larger or smaller, it makes no difference (obviously as long as the newly created partition is big enough). Maybe paid Marcium is the same?

Bill2 said:

mjf said:

stonebear said:

"if you have little use for bit locker and/or the F8 function."

I use F8 to use safe mode when needed, I wouldn't loase that ability would I?

I'm pretty sure you loose the F8 function when you dispense with system reserved. However, a system repair disk will give you the same capability.

F8 function "Repair your computer" requires only 2 things to function- the RE files (these are automatically installed on the computer when win7 is installed on the computer) and some bcd entries. It is not dependent on the Sysres partition.

All you need to do after making whatever changes you are making is- first check whether "Repair your computer" is present or not. If not the 2 simplest ways of creating it are by using reagentc or with easybcd (easybcd doesnt create the F8 thing but it can be used to create a bootmenu entry for the recovery options which is as good).

Yes and SIW2 provided a post sometime back on the use of reagentc etc to do this. The Winre is stored in the normally "difficult" to access recovery partition on the OS/Boot partition.
This gives the F8 functionality or the F8 THING as you call it.
It requires some mucking around and a substitute F key. Can you substitute the specific F8 as the function key??? If so detailed instructions would help the OP next time.
I also find it relatively simple but many would not! Again the simplest solution as I stated is you use your System Repair disk.

Here is the SIW2 link if you want to give it a go.
100 MB Partition

whs said:

Regarding restores to smaller partitions I am not sure the paid version can do that. This is a quote from one of their tutorials.

You must create enough space for the restored partition. If the total space of the selected partitions is less than the size of the partition to be restored then the 'Next' button will be disabled.

Reference

Note that free Paragon can do a "Restore with shrink". http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

That quote sounds like they mean the Restore's Next button will be grayed out if the selected target partition is too small to hold the image. Well I'd certainly hope that this would happen! Anyway, maybe not though; maybe it means what you implied.

As for "Restore with Shrink", I thought this referred to the function some programs possess of being able to optionally shrink a target partition during a restore operation. But again, maybe not, maybe it means what I wish to be able to do.

Way too many "maybes". Time for some more reading.....