Imaging with free Macrium

Thanks Keith. That sounds promising. Good to know that a prior resizing of the partition to image is no more required.

I wonder why they are showing "Disk space management" only for their paid versions. http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Yes. Disk space management is the automatic deletion of old images.

Actually you don't need to use the boot disk. You can do the restore to the new disk from within a running Windows, or do a clone but for some reason that seems slower than a backup and restore.

Hmm, that makes sense. So at the end they say nothing about the ability to dump a larger partition image into a smaller partition. That makes Keith's experiment even more valuable.

whs said:

Hmm, that makes sense. So at the end they say nothing about the ability to dump a larger partition image into a smaller partition. That makes Keith's experiment even more valuable.

Where is disk space management, maybe I'm overlooking it in the program but I can't find it ?

If you have the paid version it's in Advanced Options.

eldinv said:

mjf said:

Britton30 said:

My suggestion, and I've done this, would be to clone the 1T to the 500GB which will automatically resize the unused space to fit the 500GB. I did this and cloned a 500GB drive with 32GB of data to a 80GB drive.
I think an image would include the 1TB in total, but I may be wrong.

I think this may be the case for the free version as well.
All you need to do to be safe is reduced your source OS partition to something under 500GB before making the image then resize the partition back to its 1TB. Partition Wizard will do this easily.
When performing an image restore I would only have your new HDD connected. Note that both your 1TB and 500GB will have the same disk signature and cannot be connected at the same time (disk signature clash).

Do you suggest I tick both the system reserve and the OS partition. When ever I restored I just restored the OS image and didn't have to worry about that system reserve.


Best regards,

Eldin

Yes. This is what Macrium will do if you select the option "Create an image of the partitions required to backup and restore Windows"
Generally you don't need to reimage the System Reserved partition but it is so tiny I think it is a bit silly not including it. It is needed for a new HDD. Of course you can do away with it as suggested but generally I don't see the point.
I never clone but use a system image restore to transfer to a new HDD. Every image allows you to create a new HDD at the point in time the image was made.
I ha

Wolfgang, thanks for the WinPE ISO. I see you updated it again a few days ago because of this update.



Thanks,
Jim

I found it out tonight when doing some imaging.
I can't download the .iso. When I sign into Live and click either the file title under Name or the link in the upper right, nothing happens.

Phone Man said:

Wolfgang, thanks for the WinPE ISO. I see you updated it again a few days ago because of this update.



Thanks,
Jim

This raises the question could older images be questionable? I like to keep some older images back to when I did a clean install.