New
#701
The picture will tell you the story.
Hi 0jh and welcome to Seven Forums. Yes I have restored Windows many times using Macrium. It would help if you could say what the message you got was.
To answer your initial question - Macrium has never failed me.
Regardless of whether using Macrium or any other imaging software,
you are NOT able to restore an image to an unbootable system unless you can boot it
You really need to prepare in advance by having a Bootable Recover CD or Flash Drive holding software that can restore an image to the HDD/SSD.
This will ensure that if your HDD breaks down, you can instantly replace it with an new and totally empty HDD/SSD and restore your backup image and solve all your problems - ASSUMING you keep your images on a separate HDD, preferably an external HDD which may survive a small fire in the main computer case.
It is very advisable to ensure that your recovery device can actually boot into the system before you need to actually restore.
Test this whilst your computer still works,
because NOW is the time to use the internet and ask for help if your BIOS needs configuring.
I am disturbed by your uncertainty of "wPE or Linux"
When running under Windows there is NO WAY of Macrium using Linux.
Instead :-
If restoring the system partition C:\ you may a restart and then "Macrium-RAM" will delete C:\ and restore C:\ - where "Macrium-RAM" is my term for executables that Macrium places in RAM before the restart.
If restoring a non-system partition, such as D:\ or the 2 GB test suggested in post #699, there will probably not be any restart unless that partition holds a file which Windows considers to be "in use".
Your final test to prove readiness for disaster is the use of your Boot Recovery CD/Flash to actually restore your 2 GB test partition. This should prove that you have all the USB3 drivers and anything else which just possibly might be needed for your specific computer.
If you are using USB3 then Linux CD may well fail,
but the WinPE is much more likely to succeed on first attempt,
and if WinPE fails it is feasible to add the specific drivers that are needed - ASSUMING you do it now whilst the computer works.
All the above assumes that your images are valid.
It is advisable to consider your backup incomplete unless you have validated it upon creation,
and personally I prefer to precede restoration with a validate to be sure the backup file has not been over-written since creation, but I have never yet encountered this problem.
I just noticed version 5.1.5496.0 is out with GPT support and it allows users to create Windows PE Rescue Media? Are my eyes tricking me?
*edit* - nvm, still requires a long download
Where can I find the winPE image for 5.1 or does the one for 5.0 work with 5.1? I remember downloading the winPE image from here a while back ago…
Last edited by 0pTicaL; 01 Jan 2013 at 21:25.
Have a look at the first page of this tuturial. whs was generous enough to provide a link to his skydrive where you can downlaod the winPE image.
Imaging with free Macrium
If you don't find it in the midst of the tutorial, here is the Skydrive link for the .iso - and it works with older and newer versions.
Little Jay, whs thanks for the reply.
I did a test image on my HP laptop, it has two 5400rpm hdds and I make a backup (85GB) onto the 2nd hdd. I am currently in the recovery process and it's taking a very long time, it's been over 30mins and it's only 45% finished. I am still using Acronis 2010 (the last known stable version I know of) and it does not take as long.
Was there something I missed during the image creation process? I'm trying to move away from Acronis as I do not know which version is stable that supports GPT.
Not enough information.
Is 85 GB the size of the *.mrimg image backup file ?
How does that size compare with the Acronis *.tib image backup files ?
By "Recovery Process" do you mean you are using the Macrium Reflect WinPE Boot Rescue CD to RESTORE the system drive ?
N.B. Macrium and Acronis use different terminology,
but they have similar capabilities by different names.
The backup :-
can ignore free space with all its deleted files and is faster ;
OR it can include all Free space with all its deleted files and takes much longer.
Appr. 1 hour for 85GBs sounds a bit slow. But I cannot really tell. All my systems are on SSDs and I image to eSata or USB3 attached fast spinners. That takes less than 10 minutes for appr. 30GB (my data is on another partition).
But the time it takes to make an image should not really matter a lot because you can run it in the background and do other things in the meantime.