Macrium Reflect Free restore to new hard drive?

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by TedW, Feb 11, 2014.

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  1. TedW

    TedW Registered Member

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    New forum member here. The question is in the final paragraph, but I've provided some info here which caused the question. I have been using Reflect Free for 2 years on a Vista Laptop, a Win7Pro laptop and a Win7Pro desktop as protection against failure of the hard drive. I regularly image using the "Windows" option, which includes the C partition and the System partition. A separate "Files" partion machine on the machines are backed up using other software, including a dedicated machine with Ubuntu and a RAID1 on the LAN for backing up the desktop's files. I use three 500GB Sata drives and a BlacX box to store the C Reflect images.

    I recently reconfigured a 10 year old Dell machine that runs XP. I use it off-line, no longer connected to the internet, to run a Velleman oscilloscope/spectrum analzer and a couple of PIC programming applications and an Ardiuno application that uses MS Excel for control and output. All MS products are legit installations (it is the original OEM XP install upgraded to SP3), so I need to keep the machine running.

    I imaged the C partition of the old XP machine with Reflect Free with the idea to maintain the C partition, but restoring it to a "new" (different) hard drive. When I tried to restore using the Linux boot media to the blank formatted hard drive as the only drive in the machine, I got an error message to the effect that the free version of Reflect could restore the image only to the original hard drive. I ended up using Clonezilla to do the image and restore job.

    The question is, if the hard drive fails in my laptops or the Win7 desktop , all OEM installs, will I be able to restore to a replacement drive using the Macrium Free? The info on their website is inconclusive as to whether I would have to use the Personal or Pro version to do this. I searched this forum for a similar situation, but didn't find a conclusive answer.

    Many thanks in advance.
     
  2. brihy1

    brihy1 Registered Member

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  3. alan_b

    alan_b Registered Member

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    Depending upon a Linux Boot was not a good idea.
    The WinPE Boot is far better equipped with drivers,
    e.g. it can access backups held on a USB3 connected drive.

    It is POSSIBLE that the free version of Macrium COULD be cripple-ware,
    but I think it far more likely to be a problem with limited LINUX capability.
     
  4. Niagara73

    Niagara73 Registered Member

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    I have done several times backups and restoration with Macrium free with Windows XP , as well as restoring on another HD.
    The goal to achieve this task is to make a Macrium Reflect WinPE 3.1 bootable CD or USB stick made from another PC running Windows 7 or 8.
    You will be completely independant from OS and Hardware.
     
  5. TedW

    TedW Registered Member

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    Thanks for the info. I have just made a WinPE boot disk from my Win7 desktop and I will use that for restorations.
     
  6. biased

    biased Registered Member

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    Having use the macrium for many years now, always having good restores. Even to new drive or other hardware. Possible that newest versions are making a limitation, but older version (4.x) do surely not.

    Also PE is nice. I do that and also grub4dos to not needing the cd/dvd but off .iso on drive.

    But only yesterday I restore image from 2011 to hp machine. Image originated on dell machine, but motherboard chipset same, so different almost everything, but still it work. And also using the linux restore cd for this, and over network mapped drive for image.
     
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