Imaging with free Macrium

mjf said:

I would keep learning how to use Macrium since system imaging is your best security.

Yep, I have a Macrium image of my new laptop, stored safely on a spare external HDD.

Now I have to repair my primary external HDD so I can use it to store all my backups going forward. It has some old backups (my old laptop plus a bunch of old files) that I want to preserve if I can while I do the fix.

I do not want to appear to be hijacking this thread, so I will let it go at that. I started a separate thread to address my partition failure/restoral problem, will work the details there. Thanks!

It didn't work for me, but I created a new one from Macrium and it did work.

whs, thanks for your service. I've been updating the Macrium versions throughout the years using your ISO files. Unfortunately, I have to report the first time I've encounter an issue with your latest Rescue 5.3.7299..iso file. I think it may be corrupted because this error appears whenever I attempt to load the Macrium WinPE:

"A winpeshl.ini file is present, but no commands were successfully launched. This could be caused by incorrect formatting or an invalid executable name. Please consult the documentation for more information."

I re-downloaded the file to be sure and also tried to create bootable images on USB using two different version of Rufus portable, so I narrowed out that those weren't the culprit. I had to revert back to your previous 5.3.7220 ISO file to make it work. The first hint seemed to be too good to be true based on the file sizes: 140,480 KB vs 160,320 KB. It's not often I see new versions result in a small size compared to previous versions as software usually becomes bloated over time (unless of course the developer happen to rewrite code to be more efficient).

WHS:

Is this newest upload that you are doing today known to be fully compatible and non-problematic with UEFI and GPT?

I'm going to be switching to UEFI by year-end and am looking for any pitfalls, particularly concerning Macrium. I have only the free version.

whs said:

as far as I know it can handle UEFI.

Can I take that to mean that you don't know from personal experience?

I see that there is a version 6 plus, at least for the paid version.

Is it a guess, an assumption, or a known fact that the currently uploaded version (5 plus) would NOT restore images made with the future free version 6 as normally installed on a C partition?

I'm just trying to get a better understanding of exactly when I should expect your uploads to NOT bail me out in a critical situation. I very rarely have to restore, but I want to be fully prepared when I move on to UEFI and the dreaded Windows 10---possibly at the same time.