I got excited for a few seconds when MR Free notified me there was an update. That joy didn't last long after the updater said there were no updates available.
I have my internal NVME SSD drive with Macrum-Reflect on an external NVME (Yamaha Evo 970+ in the USB Housing adapter) cloned, to change the built-in hard drive with the cloned at a crash. The cloning worked well, all partitions are available, however, Windows “C” partition is now in the clone Windows “D”. What happens, when I swap the two hard-drives? Will Windows “D” be renamed Windows “C” and can boot from it? Thank you, Sabine Win11, Gigabyte Aero17, MR8
Windows assigns the first free letter to the external USB drive, which is letter D. If you swap the drives, this drive will get the letter C and the drive that was internal will get the letter D. Sometimes this does not happen, then manually in the context menu of This computer > Manage change the letter D to C. If Windows will not boot from "new" disk C, it means the boot loader remained on the "old" disk C ("new" disk D). In similar to your situation I copied boot loader from disk to disk with help of command line. Another option is to create a system image in Macrium Reflect and restore to the new drive.
@aldist, thanks for the quick report. I'm not an IT professional: would you please post the command line string for copying the old bootloader to the new one? Alternatively, I will create a system image on the new drive .
Sabine, It should be fine. Remove the internal NVME and install the Yamaha NVME internally. You shouldn't have both drives connected for the first boot from the clone. Windows should boot OK. The booting OS assigns the drive letters and it will assign C: to itself.
Drive letters are assigned by an OS. There’s no data on the partition itself that says, “I should be drive letter X.” So yes you will be fine if/when you swap. Different OS environments can and will assign different drive letters to the same volumes. But yes, if you boot Windows from that other disk, its Windows partition will become C. Bootloaders have nothing to do with drive letter assignment, and your main disk’s bootloader would have been copied anyway when you performed the clone if you selected all partitions. There is no need to manually run any bootloader copy commands for your scenario, so I wouldn’t muck with that. Worst case, you would boot into Reflect Rescue Media and run Fix Boot Problems after swapping, but typically even that isn’t necessary. @aldist you wouldn’t be able to change D to C, because either C would already be in use by the Windows partition and therefore could not be freed up for something else, or the Windows partition that is NOT currently using C (extremely rare) could not be unmounted while Windows is running from it in order to start using a different letter as a mount point. And since when does Yamaha make SSDs? Evo 970+ is a Samsung model…. Well technically 970 Evo Plus.
I migrated to a new SSD, I don't remember which way. I made the old drive unbootable. Everything was fine, no problems in operation. Then I found that the system did not boot when I unplugged the old drive, lack of experience, and somewhere I had made a mistake. I made sure that the bootloader (boot folder, bootmgr, BOOTNXT, BOOTSECT.BAK files with "hidden" and "system" attributes in the root of the C drive) was on the old drive, but not on the new drive. I used the command line as admin to copy the boot loader from the old drive to the new one bcdboot c:\windows /s c: The operation takes 1 second and the problem was solved. It is so clear that the two C's cannot exist at the same time, but change the old C to F, change D to C, and the issue with the C for the new drive will be solved. Also I did not forget that the original disk and the cloned one must not be installed in the computer at the same time (apparently this does not apply if one of them is installed in an external USB box).
Sorry for "Yamaha", of course it is the "Samsung". Thank you for your answers. So, I learned: With a hard drive crash, I remove the broken hard drive and use the new, cloned hard drive. Windows puts the current "D" partition on "C", can boot, and my (digital) world is saved. The 2nd option would be ( I regularly do MR hard disk images): Install the new hard drive, change the boot order in the UEFI , boot from the MR rescue stick, and then restore an image from a USB-plate to the new hard drive . I hope I understood everything correctly and excuse my English Sabine
Well that might explain the need for the additional step. But it’s avoidable if the clone is done properly, which seems like an option in this case where questions are being asked proactively. Well that was the problem then. You made sure that bootloader files existed ONLY on the old drive and NOT on the new drive, and then you were surprised that the system didn’t boot from the new one after you disconnected the old one? That command syntax is applicable to Legacy BIOS setups that use MBR disks. For UEFI systems running GPT, the target (after the /s) would need to be the EFI partition, not the Windows partition that you’re copying from. The problem here isn’t that you can’t have two C drives at the same time. The problem is that there is no scenario where that set of steps would be possible to perform within Windows, because you cannot change the drive letter of the Windows partition while Windows is running from it. In your example, if the Windows partition started off as C, then you can’t change it to F while Windows is running. If on the other hand the Windows partition started off as D — which again would be extremely rare — then yes, you could change your C partition to F. But even after freeing up the C letter, you wouldn’t be able to change the Windows partition from D to C while Windows is running from that partition.
Yes, although for the second option, you generally don’t have to change the boot order just to boot from a flash drive. Most systems have a key you can press during startup to access a one-time boot menu to temporarily override the order for that one boot. It’s much faster than rearranging the boot order and then having to change it back afterward. And some UEFI systems don’t list temporarily connected USB devices in their boot order anyway. They instead only show boot options that have been registered into the firmware. In that case, the one-time boot menu is the only way to boot from temporary devices.
To mount the image in Windows Explorer when Macrium Reflect is not installed, copy the psmounterex.sys and PSVolAcc.sys files to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\. You can extract these drivers from the v8.0.7279_reflect_setup_free_x64.exe distro by unpacking them into 7-Zip and then unpacking LibFiles.cab.
@aldist, Thanks for the info, I might have to try that. Would I need that when changing the hard drive, if the old and new hard drives have Macrium installed ?
About v8.0 Free. Which version is officially the latest Free, v8.0.7175 or v8.0.7279? The changelog contains only v8.0.7175, but Download Agent downloads v8.0.7279. In general, everything is confusing.
If I turn off Bitlocker encryption on my computer, do I need to recreate my rescue media that currently includes Bitlocker support that automatically unlocks the drive? If yes, do I just uncheck the add Bitlocker support and auto unlock advanced options and then rebuild?
No you don’t need to do anything with your Rescue Media. Auto-unlock just stores unlock keys on Rescue Media to have available in case Rescue encounters any locked volumes. If there aren’t any locked volumes (or there’s a locked volume for which none of the stored unlock keys work), then things just carry on as normal. Rebuilding without BitLocker support might give you a slightly faster and smaller Rescue Media build, but then you won’t be able to work with BitLocker at all. I figure you may as well have that capability available in case you might have an unexpected need for it. You can certainly choose to stop storing auto-unlock keys on your Rescue Media though.
Thanks for the explanation. There are still some things about Macrium BitLocker support that I don’t understand. That’s why my laptop is now unencrypted. Here’s what happened. I upgraded a three-year-old laptop from Windows 10 Home to Windows 11 Home. My assumption was that I could just restore it if Windows 11 didn’t work out and things would be back to the way they were. Wrong! I decided to restore the laptop to Windows 10, and to my surprise, Macrium said it had to do an unencrypted restore. The laptop is now back on Windows 10 and works fine. Are there any issues I need to be aware of that could be left over from an unencrypted restore besides the lack of encryption?
Nothing to worry about except for lack of encryption, which can of course be resolved by re-enabling BitLocker. Make sure to back up your new Recovery Key if you do that. Reflect can restore onto an existing BitLocker partition and preserve the existing encryption — Macrium calls this a “BitLocker Live Restore” — but that has some requirements: 1. The target partition must be unlocked prior to staging the restore. (If you manually unlock the partition in Rescue using manage-bde, click Refresh under the Local Disks tab to force a rescan and confirm that Reflect now sees the target as unlocked.) 2. You have to be restoring onto the original partition you backed up from, not a new partition or some other random partition. 3. The partition must still be at least as large as it was when you made the backup you’re restoring from. (Your Windows partition might have been shrunk during the Win11 upgrade to make room for a larger WinRE partition.) 4. I think the partition must be NTFS. The bottom three requirements are also true for using Rapid Delta Restore, which I’m guessing isn’t a coincidence. Macrium has a KB article called “BitLocker Restore Outcomes” that you might find helpful.
Windows 10 Home Edition doesn’t have the full version of BitLocker. It has something called Device Encryption which does not include the full BitLocker GUI. Do you know how to back up the Recovery Key without the BitLocker GUI? When I originally set up the laptop it automatically backed up the Recovery Key to my Microsoft account. Will it do that again if I re-enable Device Encryption? I searched this and could not find a definitive answer. There seems to be a lot of confusion around the different versions of BitLocker/Device Encryption.
Windows 10 Home still allows you to use manage-bde. So you can just run “manage-bde -protectors -get C:” to show the enabled protectors. One of those will be your Recovery Key, and as long as the partition is unlocked when you run that (which of course it will be if you do this while running Windows), then the Recovery Key itself will be displayed there. But the “normal” way the Recovery Key backup is achieved with Windows 10 Home is that it gets uploaded to the Microsoft account that you link to your Windows logon. BitLocker is kept in a suspended state until you set up that link — although that too can be overridden using manage-bde if you want to use BitLocker on Windows 10 Home without linking an MS account. (Of course Win11 Home made Microsoft accounts mandatory overall, so now the only way to stick to a purely local account is with Pro or better.)
