Macrium Reflect Free Image Restoring Question

ok im curious of how to use Macrium free in an emergency situation where my OS on my C Drive becomes unbootable and the image is on my D drive.

if i cannot get into my OS, how do i restore a macrium reflect image from my D drive to get my system up and running again?

 

Use the Macrium rescue cd.

 

so from within the rescue CD linux environment i can restore the image on my D Drive?

 

Yes, as long as the partition information and files on volume D didn't get trashed. It's best to also have another copy of the backup files somewhere else just in case. It's also a good idea to actually try restoring a backup. If you don't want to go that far, you can at least go far enough to select the backup on volume D before canceling the restore, to convince yourself that the backup will be accessible.

 

ok thx

 

You're welcome .

If you're going to try to restore a backup over your existing partition(s) as a test, as insurance you could first make a backup with another program such as Paragon Backup and Recovery Free.

 

I have imaging software but it doesn't fully protect me against total failure of my system disk.

Can Macrium make a bootable image on an external drive, if so desired?

If Macrium cannot do that, is there any imaging software that CAN do so?

 

Most can do that, at least with a little tweaking. Just take the bootable ISOs provided, mount them with UltraISO, and copy them over to your external or flash. This or course means that the receiving drive has to be prepared correctly first.

1. Open a command prompt and execute the following commands to create a partition (explanation in bracket, which should be ignored):
2. Diskpart (text-mode command interpreter to manage objects such as disks, partitions, or volumes)
3. list disk (displays a list of disks and information about them)
4. select disk 1 (assuming the USD key is detected as disk 1 from the list generated by “list disk” command. This setting must be correct or else you may accidentally wipe out the hard disk instead.)
5. clean (removes any and all partition or volume formatting from the disk with focus)
6. create partition primary
7. select partition 1 (the only primary partition created by command above)
8. active
9. format fs=fat32 (use FAT32 file system)
10. assign (assigns a drive letter or mount point to the volume with focus)
11. exit

 

I personally like to place an .iso of bartPE or some win7 pe onto the c: drive for common restoration purposes. In XP a boot.ini entry can then be employed to start the bartPE .iso into ram drive. In win7, it is a bit different, but you do much the same. I use a modified grldr myself in win7.

But you can also house .iso files on the same drive that the image is located (hdd that is) and use different grldr techniques to boot them. I like booting PEs into ramdisks, much quicker.

As N8 says, bootable media such as thumbdrives, external hdds or good old optical is my fail-safe backup for using macrium. Setups can be elaborate or just a simple bartPE bootable cd will work as well, just takes longer. You can place the macrium PE plugin that it creates on a hdd somewhere accessible, or a thumbdrive, or network drive. For me the macrium plugin can be located anywhere and bartPE or a win7 PE will use it just fine.

Sul.

 

While N8's advice is great, I feel I must warn you..

BE CAREFUL USING DISKPART !!!

It is very easy to make a mistake with that tool, and it is very unforgiving. If you are going to try it for the first time, check, then double check, then triple check that you are using it on the correct disk. VERY IMPORTANT.

If you do make a mistake, there are tools that can restore the partition information. However, to be really cautious, it would not hurt to find a utility to backup your partition information. This way if you do make a grave mistake, the data is still there and all you need to do is restore the partition information.

Sul.

 

Sully,

How exactly do you modify grldr to boot an iso located on your hard drive? and does it only work with winpe based iso or any bootable iso?

I think Macrium's full version winpe component does something similar. It allows you to boot into winpe recovery environment and the environment is housed in your "C:\Boot\Macrium" folder.

 

I would have to dig around again to find it. I think I made a post about it somewhere in the "other software" forum before it was split. Maybe 3-4 months ago.

Anyway, normally when using a grldr (grub4dos in this case) it becomes your boot loader. grldr then in turn chainloads whatever OS you want it to, xp, win7, linux, etc. In the newer versions of grub4dos they can also boot an .iso file. The .iso itself has to be able to be loaded into ram. On XP and bartPE, you had to put in the ramdisk.sys file properly (from a win2003 service pack) for ram boot to work. In XP you then modified this PE image and created a couple other files along with it. Jaclaz was the author of the tool (a batch file) I used to do that. It was part of Wimbs easy XP suite. It was a boot sector modifier batch file.

Moving on, with PE3 (win 7) it already has the needed ramdisk stuff. So you can create a PE3 project easily. I used Win7RescuePE. I made a script for WinBuilder (which the Win7RescuePE is used with) to include Macrium into the PE. You can also run the reflect restore program from any media. Anyway, I started out by using a grldr as normal, but did not like it. Somewhere along the way I picked up a modified grldr that does not need a menu.lst file at all. And in fact, I was able to "carefully" hex edit this to include what I wanted.

Now, I have a win7 PE .iso file on my c: drive. I has to be defragged (one continuous file) to work. But as my machine boots up, there is a blinking cursor after post but before the boot loader. This is the grldr doing the loading. If I do nothing, then it passes the the default boot loader of the c: drive, and all goes as normal. However, if during this 5 seconds (my personal preference) I press the ESC key, I see my grldr menu (hardcoded into it). Then I can choose to boot from hdd, search for hdd, PE.iso statically coded to hdd0,0, search for properly named PE.iso, or in my case I also included the linux partedmagic .iso file ( I think that is the right name, forget ATM).

The end result is that by only modifying this specific grldr, and then making it the boot loader of my c: drive, I can boot normally or into a PE environment.

I can get you specifics later if you are interested.

Sul.

 

Thanks Sully,

Yes, I am interested but reading through your post, it appears to be a fairly complicated process. I mainly want to use it for BartPE; instead of burning a CD, I can save the iso somewhere on the hard disk and use your technique to boot into it, if I ever need it. I am on Vista, by the way, I am assuming the process will be similar to that of Win 7 for me?

If you can find the link where you posted the instructions before, do let me know.

 

Why not? Any imaging software worth its salt should provide means to create a recovery cd, affording full restore of the disk, including boot partition. Heck, even Clonezilla will do this. You might want to place more importance on the recovery disk than on the software. Just create an image of your system disk in two separate physical locations, that can be recovered to your target drive using your recovery disk.

 

I will make it easy for you.

Go to bootland and get the winbuilder project. This will build a PE for win7. Next, you must choose which PE flavor you want. I chose the Win7RescuePE flavor. Following the instructions if fairly simple. Just fiddle with it, examining all the options. The end result should be an .iso that you can burn to a cd/dvd and boot into PE3 with. You might also mount in vmWare to test, which is what I did.

After you have a working PE3 .iso, the rest is pretty simple.

Here is what I have in my notes for the project. Note that from the grub4dos project, you will need only grldr.mbr, grldr and a menu.lst file.

BCD_with_grub -- this is the theoretical location the files mentioned live. -- your locations will be different, but I include it for a reference point

And of course you will need the .cmd file...

Code:

@echo off
Setlocal

::Set path to bcdedit.exe (e.g. C:\Windows\System32\bcdedit.exe)
Set BCDEDIT=c:\windows\system32\bcdedit.exe

::Set path to BCD Store (e.g. C:\boot\BCD)
Set STORE=c:\boot\BCD

for /f "tokens=3" %%A in ('%BCDEDIT% /store %STORE% /create /d "Start GRUB4DOS" /application bootsector') do set guid=%%A
%BCDEDIT% /store %STORE% /set %guid% device boot
%BCDEDIT% /store %STORE% /set %guid% path \grldr.mbr
%BCDEDIT% /store %STORE% /displayorder %guid% /addlast
%BCDEDIT% /timeout 3

endlocal
pause
exit

And of course you might want a simple working example of a menu.lst file

Code:

timeout 12
default 0


title Load Vista/7 from (hd0,0)
root (hd0,0)
chainloader /bootmgr


title Find and Load Vista/7
find --set-root /bootmgr
chainloader /bootmgr


title Boot Win7RescuePE from (hd0,0)
map (hd0,0)/Win7RescuePE.iso (hd32)
map --hook
root (hd32)
chainloader (hd32)
boot


title Find and Load Win7RescuePE
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /Win7RescuePE.iso
map /Win7RescuePE.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)


#title OPTIONAL -- use Win7RescuePE (eftsboot.com bin)
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /Win7efts.iso
map /Win7efts.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)


title OPTIONAL -- Boot Parted Magic from iso (if present)
find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /pmagic-48.iso
map /pmagic-48.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)

 
title CommandLine
commandline
 
title Reboot
reboot
 
title Halt
halt

When I used the modified grldr file, the process was easier. The menu.lst file is actually embedded into the grldr, as is the grldr.mbr I assume. I don't know exactly how it works. What I did was to modify the menu in it to start what I wanted it to instead of what it was supposed to do.

Here are my notes for that version.

HTH.

Sul.

 

The most important point to remember when using ANY disk partitioning or imaging software, is to make sure your partitions are LABELLED. It makes it a whole lot more informative, and less likely that you will operate on the wrong partition, due to incorrect drive letter identification.

Ken

 

Thanks Sully,

My laptop stopped booting yesterday. I need to get that fixed first. I will give your instructions try as soon as possible. Probabaly next week. Thanks for taking the time to write detailed instructions.