Windows 10: A Question About Macrium Reflect

Will Macrium take care of it when making the Bootable rescue media on a USB or do I need a third party tool to make partitions and to make it Bootable?

I'v got a brand new USB flash Drive that's factory formatted to FAT32. Do I need to make any further prep with it?

:)

 

Correct Format for USB Stick | FAT32? | NTFS? | Some Other Format?

I'm using Macrium Reflect Free. Macrium doesn't provide support for the Free version. If they did, I'd be asking Macrium my question.

Macrium does offer a KB and a Forum. The Forum is view-only unless you own a paid version. You cannot post questions without owning a paid version.

In searching the KB and Forum, I could not find an answer to my question. Thus, I came here.

 

Disk Imaging

Hi, this is Rob again.

Try Macrium Reflect - Free for home use.

How to Create a Full-Disk Backup of Your PC with Macrium Reflect

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/7363/macrium-re...

Macrium Reflect - Free

Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free

Hope that helps and feel free to choose a rating and have a great day!

 

Just plug in the USB drive, Macrium will make it bootable and copy necessary files to it.

 

Ok,..thanks.

 

See Part Two in following tutorial for how to create Macrium Rescue USB: Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect Backup Restore Tutorials

 

Thanks for that. Another brilliant tutorial on this great website.

 

In the case you encounter problems booting rescue usb disk, please take a look at this guide:
Preparing a USB stick for Windows PE - KnowledgeBase v7 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase - KnowledgeBase v7 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase
In some cases, it is necessary to prepare usb stick this way before creating Reflect rescue media.

 

Hi there
quick way of preparing a USB

1) load into USB slot
2) as administartor run cmd
3) type in the following commands.

diskpart

list disk say the USB is disk nr 2
select disk 2
clean
create partition primary
list partition assume partition is nr 1
select partition 1
format fs=ntfs quick
active
assign
exit.

Now if you downloaded the .iso from macrium use rufus to create a bootable USB. Otherwise Macrium might create a bootable USB drive directly. I've usually found downloading the ISO and using rufus yields the best results - particularly if you need to use the bootable recovery USB stick on both NON UEFI (MBR) and UEFI systems.

when creating the file system you can choose fat32 or whatever instead of ntfs if you like --rufus will re-create the partition in any case when creating the bootable media.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Nooooo!

Do not format usb drive as NTFS. UEFI based pcs (most these days) will not boot from an NTFS formatted usb drive except in rare cases bios will allow it.

Format drive as fat32 and it is 100% compatible with UEFI or legacy bios.

 

Hi there
@cereberus
Yes you are correct - but RUFUS will re-do the partition so it's MBR or UEFI compatible (or both).
I'd forgotten the fs parameter in my command for non ntfs file system .

Incidentally if you have larger USB sticks you can create more than one partition on them so you only need to create a partition size large enough for the stand alone / bootable version of Macrium to run on.

What I have is a 16GB USB3 stick with 3 partitions where I can boot Macrium. Linux Centos and Linux Mint. All 3 of these systems make the USB stick a very useful tool. I'd advise a USB3 stick as it's so much faster than the USB 2 sticks -- they will also boot from USB 2 slots if your computer can't boot from USB 3.

Cheers
jimbo

 

I never use Rufus anymore. I simply mount iso as a drive and simply copy files to a fat32 drive.

With the standard MS iso, the drive is fully legacy bios or uefi compatible. It may be necessary to mark partition as active from diskpart for legacy bios installs but that only takes a few seconds.

 

If you are OK with standard Windows install media, your method is OK. Simply copy the install files to FAT32 formatted USB flash drive. However, size of install.wim already closing the magical 4 GB limit (install.wim on official Insider ISO for build 17025 EN-GB is 3.84 GB), I think it's only wise to learn about alternatives. In not too distant future you might not be able to continue using FAT32 USB drive to install Windows.

I am a Rufus fan, simply because it makes it so easy to crate USB media using my custom install.wim files which are always bigger than 4 GB. For my own deployment needs, I install W10 on a reference VM, customize it in Audit Mode, install all software and so on, then capture Windows image to custom install.wim. Sometimes it's only 7 or 8 GB, sometimes 12 to 15 GB, depending on Windows version, edition and intended purpose of custom install media I am creating:




I've posted the below earlier, let's post it once more *Wink

A bit strange fact but theoretically there's absolutely no reason why UEFI computers can't be booted from NTFS. However, some (in fact most) hardware manufacturers still include this restriction to their UEFI. Rufus bypasses this artificial restriction by creating a small FAT32 partition on USB drive to boot a UEFI machine, which then gives the control to an NTFS partition containing Windows install files with your custom install.wim file.

A quote from pbatard/uefi-ntfs:

Rufus (download: Rufus, the creator of it Akeo is our member) makes this automatically. You only need to take care of the highlighted settings, set Partition scheme to MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI-CSM, and set File System to NTFS:




This will create a USB flash drive with NTFS file system to allow you to add as big files as you want to / need to, creating a small FAT32 partition to take care of the boot phase. My own current custom install.wim is over 14 GB, I have had no issues in using that install media on devices not accepting boot from NTFS USB drive.

 

I do not disagree but Macrium isos are tiny of course.

Sooner or later MS have to solve the issue or else the media creation tool will eventually not work for clean installs. Of course install.esd files are smaller.

I am guessing the might end up with another install.wim file e.g. install2.wim or something like that. Also, now windows can handle multiple partitions on usb drives, they could easily go down the small fat32 plus ntfs route as well using mct.

I accept it might get too complicated in time and Rufus will be simpler. I have used it a lot in past but rarely bother now.

 

You know me, I have a degree in off topic *Wink

Anyway, just to clarify: In no way was I criticizing simple Copy & Paste method to make a USB install media. As long as it works, it's the easiest and simplest method. I just wanted to show a practical example why Rufus is a pretty good alternative, especially when as I mentioned the install media contains a file or files that are bigger than 4 GB.