USB Bootable factory restore

MilesAhead said:

I just got Macrium recently. The WinPE USB stick creation wasn't bad. The download was aboit 371 MB. On WiFi it took a little over 10 minutes. Plus it made my stick bootable without erasing my files. A pleasant surprise.

Can FREE version do that or only the paid version?

I have free version. I had the paid 4.x but my quad desktop liked EaseUS better. Now my Laptop likes MR. When I messed with WinPE in 4.x it was because I had a funky fake raid disk controller. It was a pita because all I could see of the optical disk was the 1.44 MB boot image. The easiest way to load the disk driver was manually off a USB stick after booting the CD. So that soured me on WinPE for a time. But this was painless. :)

Edit: I should add if the USB stick happens to be NTFS I suspect it will just format as FAT32 and all files will be gone. But that's just my assumption.

The WinPE can go on a Fat32 stick, but the Macrium images themselves require NTFS.

For the OP: Here is a Macrium tutorial that may come in handy. It also contains a link for the excellent tutorial that Keith made for the recovery procedure (in the first 'Information' block). The link to my Skydrive that Kaktussoft already posted is also in there.

Imaging with free Macrium

ericnumnutz said:

lastly, are there switches that you can add to the boot usb so it will automatically start to restore the image file that's on the drive?

There is schedules imaging but I have never heard of scheduled restore.

Not sure it can be done. But even then - you would lose the ability to select the restore point that you want. I usually have a stack of 10 historic restore points and I do not always restore to the latest.