Windows 10: GPT configuration question

I gave up also on (paid) Acronis a few years ago as it was buggy as hell with eufi pcs, but Macrium just worked every time. I did quite a bit of testing of free versions across a range of xdevices eg eufi laptop, a bios laptop, and a tablet with 32 bit eufi.

Macrium Reflect Free
Easeus Todo Backup Free
Veeam (recently)
Clonezilla
Paragon
Aoemi
Clonezilla

The only one that was 100% consistent, fast and reliable was Macrium.

It was the only one that worked on my tablet.

No contest in my mind. MRF is a Rolls Royce by comparison.

 

@cereberus: I moved from Easeus to Aomei some time back, no problems with my older BIOS/SATA laptop, but will shortly be getting a UEFI/SSD/HDD laptop.. just wondering if you recall what didn't work for you with Aomei? Can appreciate it's hard to recall the differences.. (I have a Pro license).

 

It just failed to restore properly on my eufi laptop, but it was an older version, and completely refused to work ony tablet.

I found all packages worked on bios pcs a t had mixed experiences on eufi. To be fair initial implementation of eufi was a bit dodgy as well.

However all my tablet tests are only a year old, and MRF was the only one that worked, which is a big confidence booster to its overall reliability.

Basically, I would install Macrium as well and hedge your bets by backing up with it as well as AOEMI, then if one fails, you can use the other. I make occasional backups with Easeus for same reason.

 

sorry about typing - using mobile

 

Thanks, I'll have to do a little experimentation when I get the laptop with latest version; better forewarned..

 

Suggest you create a usb recovery drive (control panel, recovery, create recovery drive, and click to copy system files).

Then it is a good time to experiment with AOEMI and MRF (Easeus is pretty good as well, thereafter much of a much) to your hearts content before you have installed lots of apps, got lots of critical data etc.

Not trying to teach you to suck eggs as a power user, but the one thing people often forget is to change bios settings so default is to boot from usb stick first.

Not a big deal for legacy bios pcs provided you know which keys to press, but for uefi pcs, things have changed. One slightly (imo) retrograde step is that with uefi, it is not always possible to get to bios simply by pressing F2 or something like that, requiring you to go via windows menus or startup up drive.

Even if you can use F2 or similar, it does not always work if fastboot is enabled, as you cannot press key fast enough at correct time.

This can get you in a catch 22 if windows or boot sectors gets corrupted, as you cannot boot to usb to change order to boot from usb.

There are ways around it eg remove hard drives completely, so pc boots to usb, and then yiu can get to bios to change boot order, and replace hard drive. Others involve removing cmos battery, changing bios jumper settings etc. to force jump to bios.

All this hassle can be avoided by changing boot order as soon as you get laptop.

 

It will be one of my early tasks.. with Win 8 I had boot options set for Safe Mode and Normal.. which led to the interesting situation when I upgraded to '10 that I was initially presented with options to boot to Win 10 and to Win 8 Safe Mode...*chuckle

My first thought is usually to try to ensure I can get out of the mess I'm going to get myself into... and since the late 90's and my first laptop I can say I've never lost anything much, as regards data, and recovered from partition table corruption and other problems.

I've used disk imaging for a good number of years, and am aware of the issues with UEFI of using boot disks- just have to deal with it for the 1st time.

I am, however, looking forward to an OS booting off Samsung 951 MSata (really fast) to HyperX RAM.... and fast program loading. USB3 then should make imaging a whole lot faster. Add on a hi-res screen.. hmm. And I started with a 366MHz processor, 10Gb disk, 3 laptops ago... (and earlier with a 16 bit system with 64k bytes RAM where 8 cards - PCBs- each had 8kbytes of RAM on them).

 

Yeah amazing how things have changed. I actually had an IBM XT from one of the very first batches shipped to UK, running MSDOS, as I was working for the government, and we got priority over business due to defence related work. Boy - we thought they were awesome. CPU was approx 5 MHZ (compare 2000 MHz now!).