Solved Image your system with free Macrium

[mjf]

That's why I decided to copy the mrimg to my internal SATA drive, hoping the recovery time will be faster but it ended up taking almost 3hrs.

Do we take the "copy" comment literally? If so then this could be causing strange behaviour. Have you actually imaged to one of your internal sata drives and restored?

I have a very similar system configuration to you and your imaging time to a USB2 to a 5400 RPM ext HDD seems reasonable. Remember that you can find a significant difference in time depending on how full your ext HDD is. If it is quite full you will writing to the inner tracks and it will definitely be slower.

For interest, I imaged 50 GB (source) yesterday to a USB3 on a 75% full HDD and it took 12 minutes.

 

[0pTicaL]

Do we take the "copy" comment literally? If so then this could be causing strange behaviour. Have you actually imaged to one of your internal sata drives and restored?

I have a very similar system configuration to you and your imaging time to a USB2 to a 5400 RPM ext HDD seems reasonable. Remember that you can find a significant difference in time depending on how full your ext HDD is. If it is quite full you will writing to the inner tracks and it will definitely be slower.

For interest, I imaged 50 GB (source) yesterday to a USB3 on a 75% full HDD and it took 12 minutes.

Yes, I literally copied the mrimg file from the external 1TB to my internal 320GB secondary laptop drive. I believe I used the laptop's internal drive the recovery process would be faster than over USB2.0.

My laptop is a 18.4" Pavilion dv8, i5 M450, 6GB DDR3, Win7 Pro x64 SP1 and two 320GB 5400rpm hdds.

I created a another image and this time saved it to the internal secondary drive and going to perform a restore. I will delete the volume (c first before restoring (as to emulate a brand new drive) and report back the results.

 

[alan10]

I strongly recommend the use of Teracopy, available from
TeraCopy for Microsoft Windows - Code Sector

I used Windows standard copy to copy a set of Macrium *.mrimg files from an internal drive through USB2 to an external.
Macrium validated and rejected the copies, but validated the originals.
I confirmed independently with an MD5 checksum utility that there were discrepancies.

Since then I have always used the Free version of Teracopy,
confident in the knowledge that it will compute MD5 when being copied and then read back and recompute and warn upon problems.
It also has the great advantage that if copying a large number of files and it is forbidden access to one of them,
then unlike Windows copy which aborts all subsequent copying,
Teracopy will continue to copy what is possible and then present a list of what needs to be retried after fixing access restrictions.

 

[whs]

Would it have anything to do with me deleting the volume beforehand? I wanted to test if the program works on a empty volume so I popped the Windows 7 install disc and deleted the volume before I performed a recovery

That should not have an impact

Something I didn't mention, when I booted off the WinPE disc it asks me to load drivers, are there any drivers that need to be loaded before the recovery process?

Just skip that. There are no additional drivers required.

 

[0pTicaL]

Just finished the recovery from a image created by Macrium directly to the secondary drive and it took 1:42:32. Almost 2hrs long. Creating the same image took only 22mins.

*scratches head*

 

[Parman]

Using the free version at work it took us 3 hours to restore an 80GB partition over the network. We decided 3 hours was acceptable (not desired but acceptable). Then when we purchased the server version with redeploy the restore only took 20 minutes. I'm not sure if it was a network issue at the time since i don't personally monitor all the backup times but something increased the restore process.

 

[whs]

Just finished the recovery from a image created by Macrium directly to the secondary drive and it took 1:42:32. Almost 2hrs long. Creating the same image took only 22mins.

*scratches head*

In order to understand this you would have to describe the specifications of the disks and attachments involved. CPU type and RAM would also help.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Weird

Just finished the recovery from a image created by Macrium directly to the secondary drive and it took 1:42:32. Almost 2hrs long. Creating the same image took only 22mins.

*scratches head*

Macruim Reflect images my HDDs/partitions at ~3GB/minute (Windows, Ubuntu and data files).

 

[kado897]

Not sure if the feature is in the free version but turning verify on can double the time to restore.

 

[mjf]

I ran a test today using the latest free version of Macrium Reflect V5.1.5496. I used the system in my system specs which is clearly not a laptop.
Source data size for image: 52GB
Imaged 128 GB SSD with image stored on an internal 7200rpm sata HDD.
Time to image: 9min 36 secs
Time to restore: 14 min 12 secs.

Even though you are using a laptop (i5) and 2 spinners, a 2 hour restore seems excessive. Your imaging time seems reasonable. I'm puzzled as well.

 

[0pTicaL]

Not sure if the feature is in the free version but turning verify on can double the time to restore.

I did not check the verification after restore box.

What baffles me is why the restore times differ so greatly from the imaging times. Both drives are only at ~30% capacity.

With Acronis TIH 2010 build 7160 imaging and recovery is just as fast, but it doesn't support GPT and I don't want to do trial and error with Acronis 2011, 2012 and 2013.

I'll try the WinPE disc that's on whs's SkyDrive and see if that makes any difference with the WinPE I got from fileswap on this thread.

 

[kado897]

My restore times are slightly longer than the backup but nowhere near yours.

 

[lehnerus2000]

Intelligent Sector Copy

Are you using "Intelligent sector copy"?

Click thumbnail for animation

​

 

[0pTicaL]

Yes and I think I know what's wrong. My laptop just died

Seems like there was an issue with the hardware to begin with.

 

[kado897]

Oh dear that's tough.

 

[0pTicaL]

Not really, it was expected. Had thermal issues (constant high 90C on low load, yes Celsius) with this laptop since the day I got it. Took apart the thing twice (and trust me almost everything had to be ripped apart just to get to the CPU heatsink) reapplied thermal paste (prolimatech pk-1) the first time and then a 0.5mm copper plate the 2nd time to increase contact pressure. Still extremely high thermals, the cooling on this laptop was flawed to begin with.

Anyone want two 320GB laptop hdds?

 

[kado897]

And I thought my laptop was hot at 80C on full load.

 

[whs]

The heat problem are the HDDs. I had a heat problem with an HP laptop. Replaced the HDD with a SSD and the problem was solved. If it not really dead, you can try that.

 

[kado897]

Maybe they have cured that. My laptop is HP and the internal HDD runs at 35C all day.

 

[0pTicaL]

Stupid me, I assumed the laptop was plugged in during the recovery process but it was running on battery the whole time. I thought it was plugged in when I traced the power cable but didn't dig thoroughly through the wire mess.

Anyways did another recovery, this time it took 1hr 31mins.