Image your system with free Macrium

You are welcome agile1. Macrium has saved my bacon several times.

Well I just had my first re-image failure using Macrium.

I tried to re-image my XP partition and somehow my Linux Mint partition suffered some sort of damage, which rendered my PC unbootable.
Not only that, it totally hosed the recovery disc functions.
I couldn't use the Linux Recovery disc to restore any images at all (it would "stick" on the image folders and then reboot the machine).

Luckily my friend (Linux Expert) was able to force the Live Linux Mint DVD to perform a disc check on the damaged partition and it miraculously fixed what ever had gone wrong (it listed a lot of changes).

It looks like I might be forced to image the entire disc from now on.
Creating 500GB+ images are going to be lots fun.

SIW2 said:

Not sure macrium handles ext4 all that well. It seems to make a sector by sector copy - as if it doesn't understand the filesystem.

I use Paragon. Perfect for windows and linux filesystems. You do have to reinit linux bootloader after restore .

I haven't had any problems in the past.
It has always restored NTFS and EXT4 partitions correctly (no tinkering required) using the restore disc (albeit that was using the older version).

I was restoring a NTFS partition (XP) and somehow it corrupted the adjacent EXT4 partition (it did successfully restore the XP image though).
Macrium verified the XP image before and after the incident.

Normally I restore W7 from XP and Linux from either Windows OS.
I couldn't restore XP from W7, because it said the partition was being used (the boot files?).
That meant I had to use the restore disc.
It's a pity that I don't know how to transfer the restore functions, from the Linux Restore disc, to my Linux Mint OS.

I wonder if the latest version of my restore disc is defective (i.e. maybe it didn't burn properly).
I have an earlier version, but it wouldn't select any locations on my other internal HDD (after the other restore disc damaged the target HDD).

I think that because the target HDD was damaged, Macrium couldn't figure out where the backup image was supposed to go and that made it crash.

The GRUB Rescue utility listed all partitions on that HDD as MS-DOS.

The Linux Mint Live DVD couldn't see the EXT4 partition either (using Caja).
I was able to locate it using the Terminal and my friend was able to make it perform a disc check, which fixed it.

Next time I'll try the WinPE disc that I got from whs and Britton30.

SIW2 said:

It's a pity that I don't know how to transfer the restore functions, from the Linux Restore disc, to my Linux Mint OS.

I don't know how to do that either. If I did, I would put paragon into ubuntu.

Paragon uses a Linux based recovery disc too (like Macrium)?

Why don't you just download the WinPE .iso from my Skydrive. Then burn that to CD.