Solved Image your system with free Macrium

[xxxdannyxxx]

Hello guys need a little help

I've been playing today with win 8 and made a mess of things. I made an image of my C partition this morning before joining the fun. It's an 80 gig partition with 28 gig used. Macrium free imaged this in 11 minutes to my Usb external HDD.
I booted the Usb stick with the Macrium recovery software, choose the Image on my external, choose the partition to replace of off it went.
But it didn't did it. It has just taken 2 hours 28 mins to complete the restore with no integrity check before or after.
Surely this can't be right. Windows Imaging feature does it in about 20 minutes on my system.
I am now up and running as I was before but will be removing Macrium unless I can find a reason for the hours it took to restore.
Any help gratefully received.

Danny

 

[kado897]

Hello guys need a little help

I've been playing today with win 8 and made a mess of things. I made an image of my C partition this morning before joining the fun. It's an 80 gig partition with 28 gig used. Macrium free imaged this in 11 minutes to my Usb external HDD.
I booted the Usb stick with the Macrium recovery software, choose the Image on my external, choose the partition to replace of off it went.
But it didn't did it. It has just taken 2 hours 28 mins to complete the restore with no integrity check before or after.
Surely this can't be right. Windows Imaging feature does it in about 20 minutes on my system.
I am now up and running as I was before but will be removing Macrium unless I can find a reason for the hours it took to restore.
Any help gratefully received.

Danny

Not sure about that. I have restored a Macrium image of my C drive. It took longer than the backup but nowhere near that long.

 

[xxxdannyxxx]

Hello kado897

At least you got windows 8 on lol.
I don't know mate. It's hard to work out what the issue is as I've never had to use it before.I tried from a different usb after about 20 mins with the first run, as I noticed it was really slow so I don't think its that, One was with YUMI multiboot and one from Hirens mini xp mode, and both run at the same speed.It took half an hour to get to 3% and gradually sped up.
Unless its the way Ive made the Image but I just used all the defaults apart from the name as I used my own date.
Need to find out whats happened thought before I do any more playing.

Danny

 

[essenbe]

It really shouldn't have taken that long. I restore from eSATA and it seems like it took 10-20 minutes at the most, it was real quick. I really don't know unless it was the drive transfer you were restoring from. WHS is the resident Macrium Guru, maybe he has some Ideas. My C drive is about the same size as yours, but it takes me 3 minutes to do a backup and maybe 20 to restore.

 

[xxxdannyxxx]

It really shouldn't have taken that long. I restore from eSATA and it seems like it took 10-20 minutes at the most, it was real quick. I really don't know unless it was the drive transfer you were restoring from. WHS is the resident Macrium Guru, maybe he has some Ideas. My C drive is about the same size as yours, but it takes me 3 minutes to do a backup and maybe 20 to restore.

To be honest its not a proper external it's an internal with an enclosure job but it always did the job with windows image program in about 20 mins so im not convinced its that.I'm just going to run a transfer test on it now.

 

[essenbe]

to me, that is a proper enclosure. It is what all of mine are. I have a black x and 2 rosewill enclosures with internal hd's in them. I was just searching for a reason. USB 2.0 should take longer, but not nearly that long.

 

[maxseven]

You need to do an integrity check, and maybe a speed test, on your external drive. I doubt it's a Macrium issue--more likely heat or noise on the USB cable (errors it had to correct) or just a flaky drive (that's a techknuckle term!).

 

[alan10]

Hello guys need a little help
... to complete the restore with no integrity check before or after.

With some knowledge of the Professional v4.2 I query the omission of the integrity check.
There are many hash checksums at regular intervals in the image file,
and restoring a non-system partition under Windows fails if any checksum error is found, unless a special registry key/value authorises an over-ride.

I do not know if there is any over-ride when running from the Boot CD.
I strongly suspect that had there been a checksum error then restoration would abort.

Typically there is a 100 MB System Reserved partition that needs to be backed up as well as C:\
Could there have been something unusual about your restoration options, including whether or not to restore MBR and first track ?

I suggest that you try validating the image under Windows to test whether there are multiple read retries on a failing disc.

 

[xxxdannyxxx]

Ok Guys sorry for the delay just popped to the local computer shop. Here is the HD tune test result with a new Usb cable. Nothing unusual there. Ran chkdsk on all partitions on the drive, all fine.

I've just Imaged with the windows native program to my external and it took 21mins. Then restored from that image, which took 31mins.
I'm interested in whether my procedure was correct using Macrium so I'm going to bore you with what I did this morning, see if anything jumps out.
Opened Macrium(free) Backup/Create Image. Selected sys res and C:/.Selected disk Y:/(my image drive) unchecked use image id as file name, entered todays date. Compression set at medium recommended file size to recommended.(didn't change any advanced defaults)Run now.
This took about 10 minutes.
Messed with my system.
Booted from the Yumi created usb ran rescue cd. Here I navigated to the image on the external pressed ok. Now it would only let me choose one partition at a time which I thought was odd as there was 2 on the Image(sys res and c:/)so proceeded to repace C:/ on the internal with the image.
Anything else that popped up about MBR etc I said no to was this my error. 2 1/2 hours later this finished and I repeated the steps above for the sys res part.
Sorry for the long post but I want to get this working, was impressed with the imaging process but now im concerned about recovery.


Thankyou all

 

[mjf]

@xxxdannyxxx
Your restore time for an 80GB partition does seem far too long.
BUT
My experience with Macrium reimaging is that the reimaging time depends on partition size as well of course as the size of the information imaged.
I recall imaging ~50GB from a 465GB partition. The reimaging with Macrium was considerably longer than with Windows imaging (one of the reasons I mainly use Windows imaging). I'm guessing that Macrium does something with the remaining "empty" space on the partition.

 

[alan10]

I always use the randomly allocated default name which is reasonably consistent no matter how it is viewed.

Your chosen and specified file name appears as such with Windows explorer and sundry file managers,
but there are some image file selection tools in Macrium which may use the random default name,
and this makes life confusing.

Your hardware looks unusual :-
Disc 0 is maxxed out with 4 primary partitions, unless it is GPT
Disc 2 has no primary partition and 3 logical partitions on Disc 2.

I do not see how the above would cause a big slow down, but it has potential.

Yumi appears to be associated with Linux.
Free Macrium 4.2 has no WinPE but offers Linux.

Linux based drivers do not perform as well as Windows drivers, and may lack compatibility with your hardware.

When I used Acronis I found that restoring C:\ from an image backup took a similar time to the creation for images on a FAT32 partition,
but took perhaps 4 times as long if the backup was on a NTFS partition.
I deduced that Acronis used Linux drivers that were tolerably compatible with my hardware, but had massive CPU processing overheads when reading NTFS.

I do not know whether you are using Macrium original Linux drivers,
or whether YUMI is interposing its own.
Whatever the Linux, this could be significantly slower than "native Windows" in reading NTFS backup files and writing to your hardware.

I can raise questions but not give answers - sorry.

Alan

 

[xxxdannyxxx]

Interesting comments guys. Thanks

I don't think the disk configuration is an issue the reason for the four primaries on disk 1 was just for ease, I could I suppose change 2 at least to an extended partition but see no value really.The disk 2 is only used for backups so there was no need to apply primary partitions and logical gives me flexibility to create more if needed.
I see the point your making with YUMI but its my understanding lots of people use the multiboot app to add the recovery distro to the usb.
So like you say more questions than answers.
To cure my curiosity im going to move that image to the internal drive and run it again now I have a windows image as backup, see what happens

Danny

 

[mjf]

Again.
Macrium can be slow to reimage and is dependent on the size of the partition not just the imaged data.
Try an experiment if you like but don't just use tiny partitions.

Edit: to save endless posts.
I thought your main concern was reimage time???

Is your external HDD the one with one extended partition, 3 logicals?? Why do this as opposed to 3 primary partitions.
I don't know if this would add some additional overhead. The logicals within an extended partition are chained.

 

[essenbe]

Danny, it's been a while since I restored an image. I agree that the name should be shosen by Macrium and left that way, when doing the image, you come to a point where you can choose advanced options. One of the advanced options is comments where you can enter any comments you would like. During the restore procedure it will ask if you want to restore the MBR and the next screen is whether it is to be an active partition. Due to the fact I don't have a 100MB system reserve I choose no to the MBR and just restore C and make it active. I am assuming that asking if you want to restore the MBR is asking if you want to restore the system reserve. If that is true, you can restore the entire disk in one restore process. But, I really don't know as I don't use it.

 

[xxxdannyxxx]

Again.
Macrium can be slow to reimage and is dependent on the size of the partition not just the imaged data.
Try an experiment if you like but don't just use tiny partitions.

I do get your point and I'm not disputing it.I only started using Macrium a few months ago so it was just a shock it took that long to restore.All I can say is thank goodness I didn't just have 1 500gig partition.
I'm going to do a clean install tomorrow anyway so I'm just testing now but I ran the restore from a CD instead (same image)with the same result.I quit after half an hour at 5%

Yes my only concern is image time.I do quite a bit of playing so like to have an image I can boot quick from.
Will have a look at that disk though maybe primary drives would be faster I'm not sure

Danny, it's been a while since I restored an image. I agree that the name should be shosen by Macrium and left that way, when doing the image, you come to a point where you can choose advanced options. One of the advanced options is comments where you can enter any comments you would like. During the restore procedure it will ask if you want to restore the MBR and the next screen is whether it is to be an active partition. Due to the fact I don't have a 100MB system reserve I choose no to the MBR and just restore C and make it active. I am assuming that asking if you want to restore the MBR is asking if you want to restore the system reserve. If that is true, you can restore the entire disk in one restore process. But, I really don't know as I don't use it.

Yes that makes sense. I would only want to do that though if I was having boot issues.In future if I use Macrium I will image the sysres after a clean install on its own then only image the C:/ partition, that way I can restore C:/ without having to worry about sysres which should never change anyway.

Danny

 

[alan10]

If you do not also have a validated image of sysres then sysres is certain to be destroyed on your next disaster ! !

 

[essenbe]

Alan, I think you place too much faith in validation. Validation only means it is validated at the time you run it. I had the paid version of Acronis. I validated the backup each time I ran one. I consistantly received the message that the image was corrupted on restoration. For that reason, I do still validate the image, but put little faith in the validation. And I no longer have Acronis' paid version. But, I have never had that problem with Macrium.

 

[mjf]

Macrium stores backup sets. I always include the system reserved (100MB) as a partition in the set. When you pick the image set to restore just don't this partition in the set to restore.
It's a nuisance but for a single boot OS the system reserved can be rebuilt.

 

[essenbe]

The question about transfer speed came up. I have tests on different hard drives I have. Both USB's are the same drive, the eSATA is a different hard drive. These are the speeds I get. YMMV

 

[alan10]

Alan, I think you place too much faith in validation. Validation only means it is validated at the time you run it. I had the paid version of Acronis. I validated the backup each time I ran one. I consistantly received the message that the image was corrupted on restoration. For that reason, I do still validate the image, but put little faith in the validation. And I no longer have Acronis' paid version. But, I have never had that problem with Macrium.

No, you misunderstood me. My faith is adequate but not excessive ! !

I ensure my backup is validated when it is created and should it ever fail validation I will make another backup. But never had a Macrium backup fail.

I do not validate before restoring.
I am confidant that if there is an error in the image file the hash checksum will signal corruption and the restoration will abort.
I readily accept that an aborted restoration is a disaster, but that is why I keep a few dozen of the latest image files on my secondary internal drive, and occasionally copy some to an external drive.

If you make a backup of a small partition you can attempt restoration to unallocated space.
If you use a binary file editor to first change the data in the image file I am reasonably confidant that Macrium restoration will abort.
I was merely responding to
"with no integrity check before or after"
which suggested a possibly concern that restoration had been corrupt but without warning.

Alan