Imaging with free Macrium

I've not done any dual booting but for windows you might as well include the 100MB partition in each image. That way you always have a recent version. The restore process can leave it out if you want.

You only need to make a new rescue CD when the release notes for a program update suggest it.

I recommend you have a look at this excellent tutorial that Keith made. It explains the recovery portion of Macrium and shows you how the WinPE CD (WinRE CD - same thing) is used.

Thanks Wolfgang. I already posted earlier.

Dear KADO and WHS,

I have done a test drive as was suggested by KADO in the few easy steps.

1. Transferred 1.2GB in a 2GB logical partition.
2. Made a backup image using Macrium, was a breeze
3. As the External hard drive was online so I peeked into it and looked at that drives image and Mounted it and it was readily available to view and copy but no DELETE function worked which was great since it was the image that was backed-up.
4. On the actual TEST drive erased 85% of the files and brought it down to 200MB file.
5. Rebooted using MACRIUM Rescue CD and i gotta tell you it is a whole different world for all it does for you (small hick-up will discuss below) = GOODBYE WINDOWS RECOVERY CD and HELLO LOVELY MACRIUM
6. Recovered the whole partition with ease and one interesting thing is before i rebooted through rescue CD i had renamed the partition from TEST VOLUME to TEST DISK. This is the partition that I had made an image of and erased data from
7. As the recovery finished I booted windows normally and found my data in that partition back to normal (restored) as it was before I had erased 85% of the contents.
8. Found the partition named back to TEST VOLUME as the name of the partition was recovered along with its contents.

Now the small HICK-UP
Took me less than 3 minutes to create an image
Took 12-15 minutes for MACRIUM reflect Rescue CD to load drivers with the following message:

(you may need to load drivers for following devices in order to Backup and restore)

USB Controller
Ethernet Controller
Network Controller

It took 5-8 minutes to load drivers for all than it showed message Driver Load Failed
After 15 minutes it displayed the following message

Drivers were found and Loaded for the Following devices:

INTEL(R) Centrino(R) Wireless N1000
RENESAS Electronics USB 3.0 Host Controller
Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller

I am guessing the drivers are there but is it normal for it to take 15 minutes to look for drivers seems like it ran the entire contents of C: drive to look for these 3 drivers three times over.

I also created a .docx file from the .XML file that it generated.

Please advise what i should do to prevent this lengthy scan for drivers when running MACRIUM's Rescue CD
C: drive is 80 Gigs and the drivers are allover the place not consolidated in one folder.

Should I check for updates from DELL for drivers and Microsoft for any Service Pack 1 updates

drivers list that failed to load.docx


Thanks
SAM

I've not had any missing driver problems. Was the PE one that you created yourself or was it the one WHS supplied?

I don't know why it appears empty but the iso is less than 200MB.


I was thinking the reverse. When you created the PE did it scan for and load drivers? It should pick up all the drivers you need at that time so you don't need to go find them when you boot the PE.

Maybe WHS has some ideas.