I’m not sure what the risk here is. First, if you physically change disks or even wipe and recreate partitions on existing disks, you have to edit the definition file regardless of where it’s located. But you don’t have to do it from memory. You just right-click it in Reflect, select Edit, and make sure your selections are correct. Anything that isn’t selected when you do this (such as partitions that no longer exist) gets removed from the definition file. And even if all of that weren’t the case, most people back up the partition that contains their Documents folder, so they’d have backups of their definition files anyway.
@xxJackxx , the new Reflect update now has a checkbox in Rescue Media Builder to enable SMB1 support on WinRE and WinPE 10 builds.
Thanks to the Black Friday deal I updated from v6 to v7 and see I can use Windows RE for the Rescue Image now. The manual does not seem to mention this yet... Where can I read more about this? (Is this 100% standalone? I'm surprised to see it creates a \Boot folder on one of my HD drives...)
Update: the Windows RE Rescue Image does not even boot. I get a BSOD with error code 0xc000000e9. Maybe because I boot the ISO from grub? Additional question: I'm using 2 of my 4 licenses so far. Both PC's are connected to a monitor with a 2560 x 1440 resolution (that Windows 10 correctly uses), but the Reflect rescue image offers this on one PC only. On the other (really old) it offers 1600 x 1200 max. What can cause this? Monitor? Video card?
Thanks stapp I missed this. I already have a subscription for the Home Edition. But I just looked and I saw that the support is valid until the end of April 2019. So, my question is: can I use this discount to expand (right English word?) the support for another year? And how exactly; where to go, etc.? It's less than two hours left in my time-zone on 26 Nov 2018, so I guess I have to hurry. (and, eh, I block twitter...) Any help would be greatly appreciated, from all. Thanks !!
The Rescue Media Builder KB article here should cover a lot of what you need. As for being standalone, I'm not sure what exactly you're asking. The Boot folder is a cache of files that get copied to Rescue Media builds when you generate them (ISO, USB flash drive, disc, etc.), and the files in there are also used if you enable the recovery boot menu option. Physically separate Rescue Media is standalone in that it doesn't require anything from the internal hard drive. The recovery boot menu option is standalone in that it doesn't rely on you having a working Windows installation, since yes Rescue runs on top of a self-contained Windows PE/RE environment that's completely separate from regular Windows, but since the files are still on your hard drive, it does of course require that your hard drive and its file system be in sufficiently good shape to access those files. For that reason, the recovery boot menu option can be used as a convenience, and can even be used as your primary recovery mechanism, but it should never be your ONLY recovery mechanism. You should ALWAYS have external Rescue Media, or at the very least a Rescue Media ISO stashed somewhere so that you can generate a bootable disc/flash drive on demand. GRUB definitely introduces another variable. I assume that means you're trying the recovery boot menu option? If so, what happens if you try to boot your WinRE Rescue Media from an actual flash drive or disc? If that works and the recovery boot menu option doesn't, then GRUB is very likely the culprit, although I don't know it well enough to suggest how you might be able to resolve that. As for the display resolution, it would be based on your system, or maybe video card. If you're booting in UEFI mode, the Graphics Output Protocol determines what resolution(s) you can use in WinPE environments, since traditional graphics drivers aren't available. Incidentally, some older systems have incorrect implementations of the UEFI spec and are actually locked to 640x480 when booting modern versions of WinPE. That's why the "Legacy EFI resolution" checkbox exists in Rescue Media Builder. It basically has Reflect build Rescue Media using an older bootloader to work around that issue.
Last time I checked, support contracts could only be extended on business versions of Reflect, which means all versions except Home. With the Home edition, every license you buy (including upgrades) comes with 1 year of support, but you cannot extend just the support contract. If you buy an upgrade now, I believe your new support contract will run until 1 year after the date that you purchased the license, not 1 year longer than your current support contract. However, Macrium seems pretty generous about helping people even after their support contract has expired, especially on their forums, but I've read that they sometimes even respond to official support tickets as well. UPDATE: Here is Macrium's page about their support options. It confirms that support for Home cannot be renewed. Home editions also do not get free upgrades to major releases (V7 to V8 for example) that occur during the support period; it is only technical support. https://www.macrium.com/support
My two Win10 1809 machines updated without issue but my Win10 1803 machine required a system restart. I run the free version of MR. Is this normal?
This is not my information. Someone else posted this on this forum for me some time back. This was for a quick and easy setup of Relfect after replacing my SSD and cloning a new one. Using USB Drive Info https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdriveinfo.html Open your definition file XML in NotePad ++ and edit the ID to a new one. USB Drive Info Disk ID In Macrium Reflect XML File --------------------------------------------------- Using Diskpart list disk select disk x uniqueid disk With a MBR disk this shows the Disk ID (Disk Signature) With a GPT disk this shows the Device GUID
That's certainly a valid way to modify your Reflect definition file so that it works with your new clone SSD, but you could also have simply updated it using the Reflect GUI as well. But you'd have to do one of those things after replacing or nuking your disk anyway, no matter where your definition files are stored. Additionally, this has nothing to do with the scenario of backing up definition files before updating to 7.2. The issue isn't that disk IDs will change as part of that update. The issue is that 7.2 adds new XML tags related to the new "warning" job outcome, so if you update to 7.2 and therefore your definition files get updated and then want to roll back to an earlier release later, older Reflect releases may not understand those updated definition files anymore.
@jphughan: Maybe the newer version of reflect can do that. Reflect 6 couldn't read my backed up definition file with all my schedules and settings with the old Drive ID, so I couldn't use the GUI. So, I guess that's another reason to upgrade.
Interesting. When I restored my system and checked my definition file, it showed that the disk it referred to wasn't found, which was correct, but I was just able to edit in the GUI. But I guess I never tried that in V6. Fyi though if you take a look at the raw XML of a definition file, you'll find that schedules are actually not included in it. Schedules only exist as tasks in Windows Task Scheduler, and Reflect simply matches up scheduled tasks to definition files when displaying the definition file wizard UI. But if you were to copy your definition file somewhere else, you'd have to set up your schedules again. The other settings are part of the definition file though.
As with the last update, getting this error with update to build 3897 (on the machine with the Free version only) ... had to uninstall / install. Have tried disabling security softs but can't find what's causing it. No big deal, just never had MR update issues before.
Yes, that sure helps! Thanks. Good suggestion. Will try that (later this week). The ISO loaded by GRUB is on a small FAT32 partition that boots MS-DOS. Would there be another way than GRUB to boot Reflect from this partition?
I'm using V6 Home and am about to update to v7 via the internal updater. OS is Win 7. My question is: Do I need to, and/or is it advisable to, create a new rescue media in v7? Apologies if this has already been answered but I am a bit out of touch. TIA
I might slightly disagree with @aldist . If your primary use of Recovery Media is for restoration purposes, and your old media has always worked, it will also always work with images produced with v7.2. The image format has not changed in quite a while and restorations using older v7.x or v6.x media will function just fine (I do this all the time). If you REQUIRE some of the new features of the v7.2 media (RE-based WiFi capability), then, of course, a new Recovery Media would be prudent.
Yes, use the recovery boot menu option available in Rescue Media Builder, which adds a new entry to the Windows BCD -- KB article here. So if you're using Grub upfront, basically you'd choose to load your Windows Boot Manager in GRUB, and then Windows Boot Manager would allow you to choose either "regular" Windows, or the Reflect Rescue environment. In this setup, you don't boot from a Rescue Media ISO, but rather directly from the files under C:\Boot\Macrium\.... on your Windows partition. Again, that of course requires the files to exist on the drive and for the file system to be intact, so it wouldn't survive a massive incident or nasty malware, but it quite often DOES survive a update that went haywire, for example, and of course simple cases where your system still boots fine but you simply want to roll it back to a previous state. And for the more severe cases, that's why you want to have "external" Rescue Media. And once you add the recovery boot menu option, you can open MSConfig to configure the timeout for the boot menu. I have mine set for 3 seconds because that's enough time to switch to the Rescue environment when I need it without adding too much time to my normal boot operations.
I guess I'll split the difference between @aldist and @TheRollbackFrog so you get a full spectrum of opinions. If your old Rescue Media works fine, then it should continue to work fine even for restoring images created by newer versions of Reflect. However, even the minor Reflect updates occasionally include fixes and enhancements that pertain to the Rescue environment. If you keep an eye on the release notes, then Macrium almost always calls out such fixes in red text, in which case you can decide whether to update your Rescue Media based on whether the fixes/enhancements are or might be relevant for you and your system. But if you don't watch the release notes, I'd recommend just updating periodically as a best practice. As a couple of examples of fixes and enhancements, a V7 update a while ago fixed a ReDeploy issue that could prevent migrating from a SATA to an NVMe SSD. Some people might need that capability later even if they don't need it now. And V7.2 has much better support for DPI scaling (requires building Rescue Media on WinPE/RE 10), so if you have a 4K laptop display, for example, you'll now actually be able to read text in the activity window, whereas with V6 Rescue Media, that text was microscopic, along with most of the rest of the UI. You can of course also keep older Rescue Media build ISOs around for a while somewhere else just in case your updated Rescue Media has a problem.
I missed it too, bummer. The regular upgrade discount for a 4 pack is $70 so I went with that. 7.2 upgrade was seamless.
I have Windows installed on an SSD. The reflect image is on a partition of a HD. My preferred solution is that I can boot from the HD (using the BIOS boot menu) and then select what to boot (currently via Grub). Can I achieve that with an RE image without using anything from Windows on the SSD?
Unfortunately I'm not the right person to answer that. But again, I'd just stick with the recovery boot menu for simplicity and then use external Rescue Media when it doesn't. The boot menu option shouldn't require any extra effort, and even if you managed to boot Rescue from some other hard drive, you haven't really achieved much because you'd still want to have external Rescue Media anyway. Just having a Reflect Rescue instance on a separate hard drive isn't a substitute for that, since malware and such could of course mess with data on the hard drive as well. The idea is to keep at least one Rescue Media device that's almost always physically disconnected from a PC. So I don't really see the benefit of jumping through extra hoops just to get something set up on a different internal drive.
