Running IFW on customized WinPE

I just use IFW from TBWinRE/PE.

I rarely use a third party WinPE these days.

 

Thanks everyone for chiming in and for your help!

@Brian K When I renamed imagew.ini to imagew64.ini and put my license info in that file, yes, IFW would erase
that info after I entered it and it opened. This was before I changed it to 'read only', and I think that was the reason
it was being erased, due to the read only not being set per Terabyte.

3 files from what I have read here at Wilder's was necessary...if one used the imagew64.exe, you had to include IFW.ini,
and imagew.ini...then it had to be changed to imagew64.ini for the license.

Due to how slow IFW is I have not gone any further. I have my WinPe set up with the files, they work fine just slow compared
to IFL. My wife has the newer computer, Dell, UEFI, etc., and I use IFL boot flash to back her system up weekly,
and on her system I can backup about 40GB of data and partitions in a little over 5 minutes. Incredible speed while others
took 15 minutes plus. Her system does not have a SSD, but I thought IFL does great with hers also.

I have been using Terabyte products since 2012, been doing imaging since around 2000 with a few products, but Terabyte
has been excellent, and IFL is a real treasure I think.

Thanks again to all for your help! I will soon be buying V3, but for now, V2.99 has been doing great with our systems. I manage
3 computers here, doing image backups sure helps with peace of mind.

 

Jim,

Again, thanks for the feedback. I've forgotten why we needed imagew64.ini and ifw.ini with Ver2 IFW. Ver3 only needs ifw.ini.

IFW can be slow on some systems and faster on others. But IFL is always faster.

UEFI systems are interesting and backups need to include more partitions than MBR systems. I either do Entire Drive backups or at least backup four partitions..

Recovery
ESP
MSR
Win10

These partitions are backed up to a single .TBI

 

Thanks Brian, that is what I do on my wifes UEFI system, I image all parts, but not always the Dell "Image" partition. On my MBR systems, I do full backups also, but sometimes just the OS C partition. I have restored my wifes system a few times, just choosing the OS part of the full image backup, that worked great, but I always backup those you mentioned.

I got the license data working fine now for portable IFW V. 2.99 x64 within WinPe.

I renamed the imagew.ini to imagew64.ini, added my license data, then set read only attribute to the file.

That took care of IFW asking me for my license each time. Runs fine, no prompt for license, and no erasing my data from the ini file.

So the 3 files needed for IFW x64 to run within WinPe, I needed imagew64.exe, imagew64.ini setting the read only attribute after adding my
license data to the file, and IFW.ini.

If one uses the x86 32 bit version, they would need imagew.exe, imagew.ini, IFW.ini as far as I can tell, also remembering to set the imagew.ini
to read only after adding their license data to imagew.ini.

Glad I got it sorted out with your help. Thanks and have a great day guys!

 

Hi
but is it safe Sergei Strelec's WinPE ?
what i like a lot is use total commander or other file manger like xyplorer
thanks

 

No it is not that's why Peter and some others here use it, we don't care for security.

 

Yes, I've always seen that on some systems.

Again, that's true. Same is Drive Snapshot. Now that I'm trying it I am quite surprised and content with the results, especially speed. Something TeraByte Unlimited has to improve on IFW asap, again especially IFW run on WinPEs environments.

 

I backed up these 4 partitions...

ESP
MSR
Win11
RE

Time taken in seconds

IFL 16
IFW in TBWinPE 18
IFW in Win11 23
DS in Win11 35

Looks good to me.

 

IFW is slower than DS on my WinPE, the one I shared @Brian K
Could you try it again on it please?

 

From your WinPE...
DS took 35 seconds. The same as in Windows.

From DS in TBWinPE...
DS took 38 seconds. A few seconds longer than your PE.

Different hardware between us.

 

Could you try IFW too please?

 

IFW in your WinPE...
Took 42 seconds
This was immediately repeated and I got 33 seconds. Repeated and got 33 seconds.

Strange how different environments affect the result.

 

Perhaps a missing driver. An specific driver related to mass storage or chipset. I think TBWinRE (I can't recall with certainty) grabs drivers from the OS to integrate into the WinPE/RE.

 

What's this customized WinPE?
I've had a few sleeps since this thread was started. I may have forgotten.

 

I myself made a WinPE based on W11 from scratch. It's customized to run IFW, DS, DiskGenius and Explorer++.

 

Awesome combo! With just a little effort a useful comprehensive WinPE as that one is ideal.

 

@Brian K
Yesterday I spent all day long trying to solve this mystery and I came to the conclusion it got something to do with VSS not available in a WinPE.
However, something tells me TB don't want to discuss and disclose a top secret solution to make IFW work on their TBWinPEs LOL

 

Mr.X,

Sorry, I've no idea.

 

Yes but bear in mind IFW may not be able to create the metadata hash file .@0
At least that's what I've seen in my own builds. I couldn't solve it so I stay with TBWinPE.

Actually I should say you are right, TBWinPE is a great solution. Now that I dived yesterday a long time into the tutorials, I found it extremely convenient and now I love it to say frankly.

TB support also helped me in a issue regard adding packages:
https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ucf/viewtopic.php?t=4188

 

Spoiler: My latest TBWinPE build

 

That looks great.

I used a Win11 boot disk a had a folder containing...
ifw.ini
imagew64.exe
I ran IFW and attempted a backup of the Windows 11 partitions with the metadata option. An @ file wasn't created.

I had a second folder on the UFD which was the C:\Program Files (x86)\TeraByte Drive Image Backup and Restore Suite folder
I ran IFW and attempted a backup of the Windows 11 partitions with the metadata option. An @ file was created. Interesting.
I didn't investigate why this worked from the full folder.

 

All folders were deleted from the TeraByte Drive Image Backup and Restore Suite folder on the UFD. The files were not touched.
I ran IFW and attempted a backup of the Windows 11 partitions with the metadata option. An @ file was created. Interesting.

 

I commented here yesterday I think, that I reported this "issue" at TB forums. I couldn't solve it by myself lol

 

Also take a look to this other topic I opened there too
TBWinPE - Adding Packages and Optional Components

I really love the WinPEPackages.txt solution. Cool!

 

What do the WinPEPackages do?