Macrium Reflect

Omitting Wi-Fi support from WinRE builds doesn't create any problems. In fact, it significantly reduces Rescue Media build time, so if you don't ever expect to need Wi-Fi, it's worth disabling.

 

Thanks jphughan. I originally went with PE10 in v7.2 because I didn’t know that Wi-Fi support could be disabled in WinRE. Now WinRE seems like it may be the better option.

 

There are no issues with removing WiFi support if you don't need it.

 

It quite often will be. The only possible exception I can see would be that since updating to a new release of Windows 10 would also update the WinRE files that Reflect would use, it's always possible that some Microsoft change or bug in the new WinRE version might create an issue for Rescue Media. That sort of already happened here, for example. But I guess the answer there is to simply make sure your Rescue Media still works after you update to a new Win10 release. Microsoft doesn't seem to ever update the Recovery partition updates during a given release, i.e. the monthly updates don't seem to make any changes to it. And if WinRE media doesn't work after an update and you don't need WiFi, then you can always fall back to WinPE 10, which is a "known quantity" rather than a moving target, at least until Macrium addresses the underlying issue with the new WinRE -- assuming it's something they can fix or work around.

 

I can confirm that it has indeed been fixed with MR 7.2.3858.
The title bar both in the bootmenu Rescue Environment and in the CD Rescue Media are now showing correctly PE 5.0.

Sorry for late reply (private circumstances stood in the way). I have just now upgraded to Home Edition 7.2.3858, on Win 7 Pro 64-bit.

Thanks are going to Nick and the team, and to you jphughan for the help provided and testing it too. Much appreciated, @jphughan, thank you!

 

PS: I just now noticed that there have been more replies at the Macrium forum thread involved
7.2 Rescue - PE 5 incorrectly identified in Reflect title bar
https://forum.macrium.com/Topic25915.aspx

 

Would it be prudent to make rescue media (flash drive) for both PE10 and WinRE? Would it cause any problems to update both on a regular basis?

 

Thanks for your efforts.

 

No problems updating both on a regular basis other than needing a bit more hard drive space to store the staging files for both, but I don't think that's really necessary. I personally just keep a Rescue Media ISO stashed somewhere so that I can build a Rescue Media flash drive on demand if needed using a tool like Rufus. I deliberately do NOT immediately update that stored ISO all the time so that I can have it as a fallback to a "known good" version if a newer build has a problem. I suppose I COULD keep an always-current version AND 1 or 2 historical versions, but I don't. Anyway, if you want to go with WinRE, then before you upgrade to a new release of Win10, I would recommend making an ISO of WinRE Rescue Media from your current Win10 version first to keep as a failsafe. Then upgrade Win10 and make new WinRE Rescue Media from that new version and see if everything still works. If it does, fantastic. If not, you can either keep using your older Rescue Media build, or if you need to build Rescue Media based on a newer Reflect version, at THAT point you can switch to WinPE 10 if needed, at least until the WinRE situation for the new version is resolved. But I don't see a need to "maintain" separate WinRE and WinPE 10 builds on a regular basis. If one of them works, you don't ALSO need another one.

 

You're welcome!

 

Received a PM today saying that SMB1 support will be added "soon". Nothing more specific than that, but stay tuned!

 

Good news! Thanks.

 

Mine is 1,105,984 kb .. I don't know how many mb or gig that is, but it looks like a lot. I did a scan with defraggler and looked for my largest files and found this.

 

That's roughly 1.1 GB. 1GB = 1024MB, and 1MB = 1024KB, but the shortcut is to think of them in decimal terms, which is how storage vendors and actually Mac OS nowadays represent those units anyway, i.e. 1GB = 1000MB, and 1MB = 1000KB, and therefore 1GB = 1,000,000 KB.

Anyhow, that's actually not all that large for Datastore.edb. I don't know why Windows allows that file to grow so large since the entire contents of the SoftwareDistribution folder can be deleted while the Windows Update service is stopped and it will get recreated when the service restarts without any consequences other than perhaps having to redownload some updates that were staged but had not been installed yet. On a side note though, that post by Brian K you quoted is from over 3 years ago.

 

Yep, that's what I thought. I went back a few weeks then gave up

The cleanup mentioned by JP above may also include the deletion of the EDB file itself... no issues.

 

If you click the little up arrow next to the "So and so said" header line at the top of a quote box, it jumps to the original post.

 

Wow... I've been here for 7-yrs and didn't know that

 

@stapp - now yer makin' me feel real bad

 

BootMenu and ISO is created. To free up space (466mB), can I delete folders with their contents?
C:\ProgramData\Macrium\Reflect\Windows Kits (466mB)
C:\ProgramData\Macrium\Reflect\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Deployment Tools
C:\ProgramData\Macrium\Reflect\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment\amd64
pe10_1709x64.zip (463mB) available on the hard disk.

 

You can... but you'll need those big downloads later to create updated versions of what you have.

 

Nice one @stapp. Puts paid license(s) within consideration .

 

Also seems to work for upgrades; even 4-packs.

So I can upgrade from (4x) v6 to (4x) v7 for about $10/license. Worthwhile?

 

Thanks for the link. Upgrade from ver 6 £14.40 gbp which is a lot more bearable.