USB Bootable factory restore

You can put the CD ISO or floppy image (for recovery) on the external disk. You can use YUMI boot manager to make the ISO bootable. YUMI ? Multiboot USB Creator | USB Pen Drive Linux

What's your favorite backup software you want to use?

I would look for an imaging program that creates a rescue USB using NTFS. I have a WinPE rescue USB stick with plenty of room on it for one system image(it is a 32 GB stick) but for the FAT32 4 GB file size limit. It may be possible to split the image into sections. I've asked on the Windows 8 forum since my machine is W8.

MilesAhead said:

I would look for an imaging program that creates a rescue USB using NTFS. I have a WinPE rescue USB stick with plenty of room on it for one system image(it is a 32 GB stick) but for the FAT32 4 GB file size limit. It may be possible to split the image into sections. I've asked on the Windows 8 forum since my machine is W8.

I use Macrium Reflect. You can copy the Recovery CD contents to USB flash drive and put a win7 volume boot sector on that partition.

I just did it the other way. My USB stick was FAT32. I made the WinPE on it. Macrium did not delete data files I had on it. So I just did another backup with the USB stick as the target. Macrium automatically made multiple numbered image files. Nothing to it. :)

I tried copying on an existing image but since it was 18 GB in a single file, it would not copy to the stick.

I'm using the free version. What you can do:

1. Create recovery CD or get the macrium recover ISO :
   Note
   The production of the WinPE recovery CD (which is highly recommended) may take up to 3 hours because Macrium needs to download the 1.7GB WAIK (Windows Application Installation Kit). For your convenience I have uploaded a ready made .iso of the WinPE recovery disc. That can be downloaded in appr. 8 minutes which clearly beats the WAIK download. Once you downloaded and unzipped the folder, you can burn it directly to a CD with e.g. ImgBurn.
   
   Here is the link to my Skydrive site.
   
   Here is an alternate link from FileSwap (courtesy of Gary - Britton30)
   
   I draw your attention to the fact that this WinPE CD can also be used to make images. That may be convenient in case you do not want to install Macrium on your PC.
   
2. Copy the contents to the root of USB stick partition (NTFS)
   
3. Boot to win7 recovery environment System Recovery Options select "command prompt"
   
4. Determine what the drive letter is of usb drive. DIR D:\ DIR E:\ etc untill you find it. Assume it's called K in this example
   
5. 
   
   Code:

   bootsect /nt60 K:

6. 
   
   Code:

   diskpart
   select volume K:
   ACTIVE
   exit

ericnumnutz said:

I will try this tonight, I see how this will get the program to boot on the USB but I am not sure if this will also get the image file on the same drive?

when you boot from that USB flash stick:

• Macrium reflect start automatically.
• You can start the backup, or start the restore.
• You can set all settings and select where to backup to and where to restore from.

All USB2.0 ports disks should work. Most usb3.0 ports should work.

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.