Macrium again

Hi,

I hope this is appropriate post for here, that someone uses Macrium.

Without trying to be offensive, If anyone has actually tried to test the backup file with the macrium rescu CD, please help me as I am a bit old & thick in the grey matter.

A. I get confused of the Macrium Help instruction, see foto #3 below, 'Create Rescue CD' or 'Create a bootable rescue CD', can't do both so why show them?

B. I made a Vista C:\ backup as #4 below.

Then tried to create the Rescu CD using the BartPE option but:-

Instead of geting what the Macrium Help file shows #2 which has the "Start the Reflect Restore Wizard" option, I get this #1 below, which does not have that option, thus making the boot CD useles. ............nick

 

As far as I know, you cannot test (verify) an image from the rescue disk, except right after you create it if you choose that option, and I think only BartPE disks made with the full version of Macrium (or a trial version of the full version) can create backups directly from the BartPE rescue disk.

But if you cannot boot to Windows, then you might as well try to restore the image - I assume Macrium would tell you if it were corrupt. And if you can boot to Windows, then just verify the image directly from there.

If you are simply having trouble creating a BartPE based Rescue CD, then here are the steps I use:

0. If possible, use the full version of Macrium Reflect (or trial of full version) to make the BartPE rescue CD because it has more options than the free Macrium ReflectPE, in particular, you can use it to make backups, including incremental backups.

1. You need BartPE present on your system. Download pebuilder3110.zip and extract the contents to C:\pebuilder3110a or another location (I prefer to use non-system partition e.g. D:\pebuilder3110a). Make sure you have a Windows XP installation CD, image or folder handy to build rescue disk.

2. Run Macrium Reflect and choose Other Tasks -> Create Rescue CD.

3. Choose BartPE and click Next.

4. Specify the location of your BartPE plugin directory e.g.
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\
if you extracted pebuilder3110a.zip to D:\pebuilder3110a.
Click Finish. Then Click OK when it says it's done.

5. Your BartPE plugin folder should now have a folder called Macrium with several files. e.g.
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\Files
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\Files\ReflectPE.exe
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\Files\PEExplorer.exe
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\Files\psmounter.sys
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\Version
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\macrium.htm
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\macrium.inf
D:\pebuilder3110a\plugin\Macrium\macrium.xml

6. Now run pebuilder.exe from pebuilder3110a folder to build a basic BartPE disk, which should have the option to run Macrium Reflect from it. You can also download PeToUSB program (free) and use it to make a bootable Flash drive if your computer supports booting to flash drives.

Good luck.

 

The "bartpe" option is only for windows xp. I have xp on my computer and it lets me use the bartpe plugin. For Vista, that requires a vistape bootcd which macrium doesnt support on the free version. The paid version does have the plugin for vista.

I mainly use the linux bootcd (works on xp and vista), it has always worked for me, even though I do have macrium installed in a bartpe bootcd, I never had to use it.

http://www.macrium.com/help.html

 

Thanx Page,

will try your info, & by test I meant use it on a HD to install that Backup. That's what am trying to do on a spare empty XP 160gb Sata HD & as am unable so far is pointless making backups of my system.

OK Jony,

the 12gb Backup is from my Vista laptop & am trying to restore it on another emty XP HD.

Is that not possible?, .........nick

PS .the latest free Macrium download said for Vista as well.

 

Re: SOLVED Macrium again

OK Page,

your info suceded & the Barte got the Macrium bit.

I will try & install an XP backup on the spare HD to make sure I can do it if my PC goes belly-up one day.

Thanx, Nick

 

Barte/Macrium OK but restore fails

Unfortunately the restore failed with error :- GRUB Stage 1.5, & tried it with keepold, use same & do not change MBR, nothing helps.

the uncompressed Reflect file is 62gb & the directory is 160gb.

any ideas ? ..........nick

 

I have no experience restoring images to non-original hard drives. I know some backup programs can do that, but not sure about Macrium. That said, just because you cannot restore it onto another computer doesn't mean that it wouldn't work with your current machine.

If you have time and space for backups, you could make several of them with different freeware programs directly from BartPE (so no install required), then restore the Macrium image to see if it works on the drive of origin. If it doesn't or something goes wrong, just restore one of the other images. The chance that they would all fail is minuscule.

Here are several free backup tools that can be "installed" directly as BartPE plugins and are all perfectly reliable in my experience, just not as fast or feature-rich as the commercial alternatives:

1. DriveImage XML 2.13 plugin (may require XPE plugin or other tweaks)
2. EASEUS Todo Backup 1.1 plugin (works from basic BartPE, but in my case did not work together with XPE plugin)
3. SelfImage 1.2.1 plugin. (Just unzip the file to your BartPE plugin folder and you are done). Link is to secondary location because the main site is (was?) down. This is a simple and reliable program with good compression and good speed.

 

Linux one did not do it either, still get : "GRUB Loading Stage1.5." & just hungs there.

So much for backups really, if you lost your HD completely & could not load it all on a new one. .............nick

 

If your create your macrium image on a small drive/partition, you can then restore that image to your same computer but another drive without issue. You 'might' be able to also use that image on another computer, I have done this. It depends on the hardware, or maybe a bit of luck.

If your OS drive is small, and you only make an image of the baseline OS with small tools/programs, then the image should easily fit on a single layer dvd. My win7 image, will all my little tweaks and programs (no games or office/photoshop type stuff) with medium compression is at only 4gb. High compression brings it down to about 3.3gb.

The bartPE plugin if used in a correct bartPE project, should boot regardless of the OS on the drives. Once you are into bartPE, you can use macrium to put any image, any OS, onto the chosen drive. The only thing that is OS dependent is if macrium will create the bartPE plugin or not. I found in win7 that macrium would not create the plugin, I had to do that in XP. But my bartPE that I made around 2 years ago with XP works just fine now that I am on win7.

Sul.

 

I dunno about that. If the image is intact you should at least be able to get your data back, and maybe you could mount it and migrate it to the target hard drive with another program.

I just took a look at the Macrium Reflect features (full version) and the sense I get is that you should be able to restore the image to a different hard disk as a logical partition, then change it to primary active partition, then resize it to fill the rest of the hard disk. But hopefully somebody with actual experience restoring to a different hard drive can fill in here and correct me if I misunderstood.

nichos, you could try to restore the backup as a logical partition? (with same size as the original hard disk)

 

Most of them work like this, and Macrium does for me.

A harddrive is lets say 200gb in size. If you take an image of that drive, with lets say 50gb of space, your image might end up being 25gb in size.

If you place that image on a drive that is 200gb in size, the image will succeed.

If you place that image on a drive that is 200gb in size, but has a partition of 100gb and 100gb, the image will fail.

If you place that image on any drive/partition that is greater than 200gb, the image will succeed.

It does not matter how much data is in the image, only that the drive/partition that you made the image from is smaller or equal to the drive/partition you are restoring to.

I have taken full disk and parition images and restored them to both full disks and partition. The key is that you want your disk/partition size of the image to always be small, to ensure you can 'upsize' to a larger disk/partition.

When you do place that image of a 200gb drive onto a 500gb drive/partition, it will ask you what to do with the remaining 300gb. Should the restore use all 500gb, or only the 200gb it knows about. If you choose all, then it is just done. If you choose to stay at only 200gb, you will have area left that needs to be allocated to a partition, or maybe you create a new partition from it.

Sul.

 

Thanx both,

will try logical.

the C:\ partition it came from is 42gb, the HD itself is 250gbs

The destination HD is 160gb & is empty after prepared with Maxblast & gave it 80gb & later 160gb to restore to. ..........nick

 

This should pose no problem.

When restoring, choose the image that come off the 42gb drive/partition (assuming it was an active partition). Then choose the new drive/partition that is larger than or equal to 42gb. When asked if you want to use all of the free space that is more than 42gb, say yes or no, does not matter. When asked if you want to make this a primary or active partition, say active if you want to boot from it. When asked if you want to restore the MBR, say yes if you want to boot from it.

That should be it. I have done this on many computers many times, without issue. But, always on the primary partition, have not tried it on secondary partitions.

Sul.

 

That's exactly what I did following instructions kind people gave me, 6-7 times & all I get on booup is ""GRUB Loading Stage1.5."

 

The problem resides with your PE (or loading thereof). Try installing macrium on XP, have macrium build a bartPE plugin. Then build a bartPE project using XP and include the macrium plugin. Build the cd. Boot the cd. When bartPE desktop is shown, you may use the macrium plugin from the bart "start menu". This will work on a machine that has any version windows, as the bartPE OS is running off cd in RAM.

The grldr issue is the problem. You can look in this forum and it is explained in the pe3.0 thread on using winbuilder with macrium plugin, if you like to go that route.

If you can figure out how to make a bartPE bootdisk work and load bart, you can also use the A43 file manager (included in bartPE) to go to wherever you made the plugin (on secondary hdd or usb for example) and run it from there too. It does not have to be located in the bartPE disk to work.

Sul.