Solved Image your system with free Macrium

[alan10]

Many thanks

Regards
Alan

 

[Oubadah]

Well I haven't tried the imaging function yet, but 'clone' is useless. No matter what I do it always gave a VSS error. I tried everything in Macrium's KB. So I gave up and used MiniTool Partition Wizard for cloning, which worked perfectly.

I hope reflect can do a better job of imaging, because I'm about to do a reformat and I want to take a backup of the new install.

 

[alan10]

VSS errors are entirely between Microsoft Windows installation and your computer.
Macrium does not cause VSS errors.

Macrium has also built in its own replacement for when VSS is unavailable,
but making an image with this takes longer than with VSS, and possibly is less suitable for cloning.

 

[symp]

Raid Problems

Finding it fun to play with raids for the 1st time.
Finally got Win7Pro Installed and running,
I usually use Marcium anyways, so I just ran a backup or my Raid-0 (2x64gbSSD's).
Booted with my Marcium Flashdrive, and checked to be sure I could restore it.
It shows both my SSD's as single drives, not as 1 drive.

How do I fix this?

Relevanant system info,
MSI NF-980 Motherboard
2x64gb SSD's
Win 7 X64 Pro

 

[symp]

Can someone tell if this is possible with the free version,

I have a backup of a 160gig drive, it's a boot drive.
I do not have another 160gig or bigger drive to use atm,
I noticed when trying to restore to a smaller drive it wouldn't let me without also
restoring to an additional drive.
I have 2x120gig drives that I can use,
but my question is if I restore it onto 2 drives, can I copy all the files it puts onto the 2nd drive back to the 1st drive and will it be ok to boot?

the 160gig drive backup is only like 38gigs anyways, but it's 38gigs of important data
thanks.

 

[alan10]

Version 4 cannot.
Version 5 can shrink an image to a smaller drive, and it will be bootable in the computer it came from.
You probably cannot inject different drivers that may be needed on a different computer,
and you would not evade W.G.A. license problems.

No way would you be offered the chance to restore part of a PARTITION image to one drive and the remainder to another.
If you have 2 partitions in one backup file then THAT would allow each partition to go on a different drive.

You should be able to MOUNT a partition image with your choice of drive letter,
and then use Windows to copy all files and folder trees to a real HDD,
but the organisation would not be boot-able.

 

[Corazon]

You mention having two 120GB drives. Do you mean separate physical drives, or two 120GB partition on a single disk?

In the latter case, what you might do temporarily is resize these partitions so one is 160GB (better would be 170GB to have a safety margin) and the other is 80 (70) GB. Then you can restore the 160GB backup image to the larger partition without a problem.

After that, once you're booted into the restored system, you can use Disk Management to resize both partitions back to 120GB each if you wish to do so.

 

[symp]

The problem I am having with Marcium is I cant get it to load with my raid,
I've tried the drivers, and I get always seem to be missing something..
I have a stack of coasters next to me now.
Otherwise I dont think I'd be having a problem.
I didn't know version 5 had shrink, but as I cant get it to load from a boot cd it's not helping.
I've tried using a few different boot cd's uptil now, the only one that even loaded without messing with it was arconis.. but then, my image was done in marcium.
Guess what I really need is help getting the correct drivers into a boot cd.
MSI-980a motherboard, tried the only drivers I can get which were the floppy drivers from thier website.
I even tried using a copy of XP on a spare computer to make the BartPe, but sadly it crashed to bluescreen when I tried to boot on my raid computer.

As for the 120gb drive, sadly it is 2 120gb drives and not a 250gb.

 

[kado897]

Have you tried creating a Custom Win PE boot disk with v5. It involves a 1.7GB download of the WAIK but you also have the ability to add drivers. You might also be better off creating a bootable USB stick so you don't create so many coasters.

 

[symp]

yea I have,
that's where the coasters came from lol.

I did the 1.75gb download, but that still didn't boot with my raid support.
I copied all the files from the floppy zip into a folder like it said.
It did find my raid controller but it did give me some strange missing driver error.

this is the error it says,

ATFT7H9K IDE Controller driver

 

[alan10]

Finding it fun to play with raids for the 1st time.
Finally got Win7Pro Installed and running,

Booted with my Marcium Flashdrive, and checked to be sure I could restore it.
It shows both my SSD's as single drives, not as 1 drive.

Relevanant system info,
MSI NF-980 Motherboard
2x64gb SSD's
Win 7 X64 Pro

You appear to have had difficulty just getting W7 to install and run on a home brew Raid with 2 off 64 GB SDD's

Suddenly you are wanting to use 2 off 12O GB ??D's.
Are these SSD or HDD ?

The problem I am having with Marcium is I cant get it to load with my raid,
I've tried the drivers, and I get always seem to be missing something..

Does not compute :huh:
Your RAID based computer appears to be semi-functional.
It is able to boot and do limited tasks.
Perhaps it is wrongly configured and you need to change some thing.

Your statement in post #465 suggests sufficient functionality to see the image file and to recognise the destination is too small

I noticed when trying to restore to a smaller drive it wouldn't let me without also restoring to an additional drive.

Your statement in post #468 denies any such functionality

The problem I am having with Marcium is I cant get it to load with my raid

Please, work with us here.
What has changed ?

I do not believe BartPE is capable of shrinking to a smaller HDD
You must use either a WinPE Boot CD or install the WinPE Rescue environment.

XP 32 bit on non-Raid can create a WinPE Boot CD that works on Win7 64 bit non-Raid.
I believe this should always LOAD the CD regardless of whether the main drives are good or bad,
but will not be able to restore an image to broken or miss-configured drives,
and RAID is yet another hurdle.

Are you restoring a 160 GB non-RAID image to a RAID system ?

Please note that I used standard (economy) licensed v4.2 and was unable to restore a partition to my secondary HDD.
Support advised that this version did not deal with DYNAMIC GPT,
but did deal with BASIC GPT and told me how to convert from Dynamic to Basic.
I was happy to accept their advice, made a painless conversion, and all was well

Please inspect
Macrium Reflect Feature Comparison Chart
Personal - Macrium Software
Business - Macrium Software
v5: Identifying Dynamic and GPT disks

You will see that you buy a lot of capability for an enterprise server at $180
and less capability for the cheaper licences.

The standard does not include GPT support.
It DOES however allow me to restore an image to my GPT secondary drive.
GPT means little to me because my motherboard can only boot from MBR.

I have heard that the Free version does not Auto-Validate an image when it is created, and you have to launch validation after image creation is completed.

There are probably other reductions in capability with the free version.

RAID is another complication that may require more capability.
Also Hardware based RAID and Software based RAID may be different animals requiring different capabilities.

 

[kado897]

I really have no knowledge of RAID drivers. I had hoped that manually copying your drivers in would help.


Have you tried the Macrium Support Forum? http://support.macrium.com/

 

[symp]

Sorry for the confusion, as I was/am working on 2 machines at the same time experiecing similiar yet different problems because one machine is 32bit xp while the other is 64bit Win7 .

32bit Xp = 2x120gb drives.
64bit Win7 = 2x64gb drives.

Somewhere i was trying to just get one computer going, using parts from both, images from both etc.
Fustration lead me to alot of headaches.

Both machines are up and running in raid-0.

32bit machine is powered down until I can get the x64Win7 machine backed up and safe.

64bit machine is the MSi nf-980a missing the atf*** driver.

Marcium support forums apparently is only for registered users, and i cannot simply justify buying the software without know it will work in someway..
I hear there are other all around free programs, but I also hear there 1/10 in being able to actually boot your restored images, so ... guess i'm where I am at for now.

 

[kado897]

An alterative free backup that a lot of people here use is EasUS ToDo. Best free data backup software. Hard drive backup and recovery freeware. Hard Disk image freeware.

 

[alan10]

You do NOT have to buy for evaluation.

You get 30 days free with any version :-
Downloads - Macrium Software

This compares FREE with the various licensed versions.
Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

What you have determines what you need,
and this probably applies to Easeus and Acronis and all other brands as well as Macrium.

Do you have :-
MBR or GPT BASIC or GPT DYNAMIC ?
HARDware Raid of SOFTware Raid ?

Some one on this forum can probably advise -AFTER you give sufficient information.
Answers to the above would be a good starting point.

 

[symp]

Here is the pic of my Disks,
I dont have a problem backing them up.
The problem is with the restore media not seeing my raid.

 

[kado897]

I take it you went through this procedure when you created your WinPE rescue. v5 - Adding drivers to WinPE rescue media (drivers, winpe)

 

[alan10]

Sorry but that picture is useless.
It shows a system with C:\ = 168 GB - it is neither 32 bit XP nor 64 bit Windows 7.
This seems to me to have come from a third system for which you only have an image

Computer Management is useless - it cannot distinguish between GPT and MBR.

You really need the free
Free Partition Magic alternative. Free Partition Manager Software for Windows 7/VISTA/XP/2000 and Windows Server 2003/2008/2000.
That has a column that shows GPT against all partitions on my GPT Secondary HDD,
and Logical or Primary against all partitions on my MBR Primary HDD.
For all I know it would have the capability to distinguish HARD RAID and SOFT RAID.

Do you have :-
MBR or GPT BASIC or GPT DYNAMIC ?
HARDware Raid of SOFTware Raid ?

If you either give specific answers to those questions,
or post whatever you can that others may translate into specific answers,
I am then willing and able to post on the Macrium forum and expect they will identify exactly what versions would be appropriate.

Your other free choice is Easeus which MAY be compatible,
but would never restore a bootable system from a Macrium image.

 

[mjf]

I take it you went through this procedure when you created your WinPE rescue. v5 - Adding drivers to WinPE rescue media (drivers, winpe)

I may have missed the easy approach.
With the free V5 I found I needed to add drivers to the base winpe.wim using the DISM command. Anyway this is how I added USB3 drivers.

 

[symp]

I sorted it out,
basically downloaded the nforce drivers from nvidia, and there were 3 files instead of the 2 on the floppy disk setup that came with the mobo and website download.
After that V5 said everything was there, and now the boot cd runs just fine.
thanks.