Image your system with free Macrium

Ranger4 said:

You don't need the rescue media on your external hard drive only on a CD. The CD is necessary to be able to boot the computer in the event of a major recovery. However, it is essential that you test it.

To do that shut down the computer, plug in the external hard drive, load the CD & restart the computer, hitting F8 or whatever key is necessary on the laptop to get to the boot menu & select the CD. After a short while it will display a menu & you should be able to find your external hard drive & also the particular image you wish to install. Don't install it unless you have a problem.

I got the menu to pop up, thanks so much! So, from the menu, are you saying that I can load any image? Like the backup image of my Windows backup that I made from Windows itself along with the image I made from Macrium?

Cool, I have one of those on CD as well. Thanks so much!

essenbe said:

From the Macrium recovery disk you can restore a Macrium image you made. To restore a windows image made with windows backup you need a windows recovery disk.

thank you, i tested out the recovery disks and backups on both on a 7 laptop + 8.1 desktop and it began the process of restoring before i canceled it. i've been using computers for 20 years and never have backed up my whole HDD before, just the important documents on externals and CD's. should've started much sooner, would've saved me some headache and money on CD's, DVD's, cases, labels, etc.

to be fair i've only had to reinstall my OS two or three times in that span but it sure is nice to know that even if my primary gets compromised, i can get it working in just a few steps. i REALLY appreciate all the help everyone. i also wish i joined this forum 20 years ago too now that i think about it.

i can get a restore going on both my 7 and 8.1 and it loads up fine from the boot menu via CD. i went through the documentation at macrium but it's a bit of vague when it comes to partitions, system images and images of drives so i just make one of each on each OS. should my primary become incapable of loading windows properly, will they all do the trick of restoring it to a working state?

i also made images of both the primary and the 'system reserved', NTFS active, with the primary drive to my D drive. should all my images and/or partitions include the NTFS active?

it's also vague about XML files. my question for this is: should they be made to "read only" if it will be used from the boot menu? in other words, if i can get into windows but something is still not right and i need to restore, will the XML be useless if it has been changed to "read only'?

i should've asked this before i spent hours backing up TBH but i was kind of excited to hear that you can do all this with a free version of macrium. especially after i just got both machines fixes in the past week. i wanted to get theses backed up while they are both in perfect working order to save myself time and effort should it happen again. before i backed up my drives, i ran malwarebytes, superanti spyware, cc cleaner, advanced system care, driver booster and installed windows updates. then i took off all the music and video on an external 4TB HDD to speed up back up and recovery times on both machines. i learned from the best (you guys).

SIW2 said:

You might find this useful
17514x64-v3.iso

i've never seen this software before, what is it exactly and can you suggest what i should or could do with it?

i burned the iso to a disc and ran it fine and loaded, just not sure what i am supposed do with this.

SIW2 said:

It is boot media, useful if you need to repair or reinstall. It has a lot more functions than the standard windows recovery options.

awesome, thanks! can you just give me the full name and version of the boot media? i want to do some research on it and learn more. i appreciate it sir. :)