Question re Macrium Reflect free version

I have never used MR before but based on favourable comments on this forum I suggested it as an imaging utility for a friend who was hoping for a free program. I loaded the program onto her PC and was pleased at the simple and intuitive interface. We created a boot CD (BArt I think was what we chose but it may have been the other option) and then created an image of her C drive on an external drive, then did a validation and everything worked smooth as silk. We tried to do a restore so she would see how it was done but I could not get the boot CD to be recognized. According to the help file I needed to tell Windows to use the boot CD but was unable to figure out how to do so. Could someone let me know what I was doing wrong?

Also, if I load this program on my PC would it cause any conflict with Acronis True Image? I know there are issues with ATI and RollBack Rx so I am a bit reluctant to try loading MR on my PC in order to figure out how to use the program before I go back to my friends place.

 

I use Macrium Reflect and Acronis True Image on Vista and XP PCs without any apparent conflicts. Of course, I don't use both programs to create backup images at the same time.

 

When the computer is starting, there will be a screen that say's press ? to enter setup, usually del or F2. Start up again and press that key at that screen, it can be quite difficult to hit it perfectly so you might have to start tapping it. Once in, use the arrow key's to navigate and look around but don't change anything except the boot order (poking around is fine), this is the brain's of the pc. May be under boot order, boot priority, advanced, etc. Select whichever and hit enter then 1 and enter and change cd to first with arrow key's and enter again, likely harddrive will be, choose CD and enter then 2 to what 1 was. F10 and enter again let's you save change's and exit. Bios screen's vary in appearence, don't worry about that and not a big deal at all, I probably made it sound that way.

 

If you chose the bart option it will create a bartpe plugin, which it will place in your bartpe plugin folder. For that you will need your windows installation cd, to make the bartpe. The Bartpe bootcd is recommended for systems that don't work too well with the Linux cd. If you copied the bart plugin files to a cd, it won't boot, they need to be inside a bartpe bootcd.

If you chose the Linux option, it will create a bootcd based on the Linux bootloader. This will create an ISO that you can burn onto a cd. The Linux bootcd will boot most computers, it boots every computer I have.

Macrium reflect won't cause any conflicts with other programs, I have true image/driveimage/macrium all installed in the same computer. The only problem I had was with a hard drive monitoring program, with that program running macrium reflect wasn't able to lock the partition to back it up.

If you set the BIOS to boot from the cd first, hard drive 2nd and it still doesn't work, you might have to make another boot cd, this time use the linux option.

 

Thanks very much for the replies, I will do as you folks suggest.