Windows 10: Restoring Windows 10 Image using Macrium Reflect

I am in the process of creating an Image of HP Pavillion DVT7 2200 Notebook now. Once it completes I would really appreciate getting some steps to follow to restore it. The Laptop I have Macrium Reflect running on now will have the HD replaced as it on the verge of failing hence why I'm doing doing.

Can someone please outline the steps from the point that I have physically swapped out the old HD with new HD? I will have Macrium Reflect Image contained on the root of a brand new 1 TB External drive. Please start at the point of turning the PC on for the first time and if I should have the External drive plugged in before I attempt to boot the laptop for the first time.

Thanks for the help from great people on these forums.

Steve

:)

 

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

Windows 10 on PC.

I plan to use Macrium Reflect Free to create a System Image on a USB stick (not a removable USB drive). Macrium will create the Image as a .mcimg file. The file will be approximately 74 GB. In the future, when
I want to restore to the System Image, I plan to use Macrium to perform the restore. Because Macrium will be used for the restore, the USB stick does not have to be bootable.

Given this scenario, what format should be used for the USB stick? FAT32, or NTFS, or some other format?

Thanks

 

windows 10 system image disks

Type Backup in Start Search, choose Backup and Restore.
Windows 10 Image Backup and Restore

I would never save an image to Disks which are much more volatile than an external or another hard drive.

Remember that Windows imaging is limited to restoring to the exact same offset (position on disk) so if you want more flexibility I'd use a program like the very popular

Macrium Reflect is a Free and Easy To Use Backup Utility.

 

Hi,

No idea idea how familiar you are with Macrium Reflect but there are several ways you can go about this.
If you don't want to use a USB stick to create a Macrium recovery drive then you could use the 1Tb drive for that as well.
Once you have a recovery drive/USB stick you can start creating your backup which you save on the 1Tb drive.
Make sure to check all the partitions you want it to back up.

Now verify the recovery drive boots and finds your backup image and you can then turn off your portable and remove the old drive and build in the new one.

Reconnect your external drive and USB stick if you used that as a Macrium Recovery medium and set the bios to boot from it.
Launch Macrium's restore and select your image. After it has finished close Macrium and shut down the recovery environment. Turn the portable off and disconnect all external drives, HD and or USB, whatever you used.

Fire up the portable again and that's should be it. It should boot straight into Windows.

Hope I didn't skip any steps (it's very late here). *Redface

Cheers, *Wink

 

After recovering the image to the new hard drive it would not hurt to run the utility under the restore menu to fix startup problems. That will help ensure that the computer actually boots into Windows the first time.

 

What do you mean? Can't you trust MR to do the job properly the first time?

 

If the computer boots to Windows after using Macrium Reflect then it has done the job.

 

Why not answer my question and stop being a smartass?

 

Fdegrove,

Thank your for you advice. I'm not familiar at all with Macrium Reflect. I haven't used it before, just read about it here and it looks easy to use. Please let me outline what I have so for and will provide what I have done as I want this project to be successful and I'm not in a hurry, just want to get it right and learn from the process. My data is backed up either way so if it goes bad, I'm covered.

First I created my image by following the process from this link.
v5: How to create a disk image (Backup, Image, v5)

One thing I will mention, I did not create the recovery stick or put it on the External 1 TB Drive you mentioned. When I first started Macrium, I received a window with the title Rescue Media, it said important, you have not created Rescue Media to enable system recovery of your PC. Do you want to create Rescue Media now? I chose the No option as the procedure in the link above had no mention to it, probably not a good choice.

I continued with creating the image, it ran for hour and 25 minutes, once completed it created a file named BF43B3B6AAD75E2-00-00.mrimg I actually was expecting a .xml file from what I read about this process

My question is will this work if I continue and swap the new HD in? There were 4 partitions backed up, 1-System NTFS Active 46.2 MB 199.0 MB, 2- C: NTFS Primary 193.07 GB 282.47 GB, 3-(None) NTFS Primary 421.1 MB, 4-Recovery D: NTFS Primary 12.82 GB 14.94 GB All of these were checked by default so I just went with it thinking this is what I want to move to the new HD. The new HD is a brand new drive from HP out of the package, is this ready to go as is?

Based on what I have so far am I set to continue or do I need to start over and create the Rescue Media?

Thanks again for your help, really appreciate it.

Steve

 

In addition to the above. Here's my suggestion in step by step.
I assume you have Macrium Installed in your current HD and already made a backup copy.

• Connect your new HD via USB port and boot up.
• Run Macrium, click on Restore tab then select the Backup Image that you made to restore
• click on "select a different target disk" then select your new HD as destination
  
  
  
• Proceed to restore then Shutdown and disconnect the old HD and replace with the new HD
• Boot up with your new HD.

 

It's an extra measure of confidence to ensure that the restore process completed successfully and doesn't hurt anything to do.

 

Hi,

Sometimes it won't boot after you used MR for cloning HDs. You then just lest Win10 repair its BCD record and off you go.

Cheers, *Wink

 

Hi,

@Steve:

It's always a good thing to have around in case your original HD refuses to boot for some reason.
I'd also recommend to have Macrium install a bootmenu entry so it can load its recovery environment (actually a previous version of MS WinPe but you can easily replace that with the latest version should you feel inclined to)

Topgun's method works fine.
Macrium Reflect is a great tool allowing for several ways to actually skin that cat. It's also pretty intuitive to use and blazing fast.
Throughputs well over a Gig/s are no exception.

It does create a xml file that is saved in a subfolder of your "documents" folder but it doesn't require that to do a restore.

Cheers, *Wink

 

Fair enough, but is it really necessary? If you can't trust the backup/restore process then maybe it's time to look for another program?! I've used Acronis TI for ages and it's never let me down. Recently switched to MR because TI is getting overloaded and dosen't feel safe anymore. I really, really hope MR is reliable and robust. Your comment makes me wonder ...

 

No, it is not neccessary. Same as you, I was a long time user with Acronis until I had some bad problems.

• Acronis gave errors when restore even the verification passed.
• Acronis Shell Extension caused Explorer to freeze.
• And worse, Acronis modified the MFT and have 2 services running at all time and even if you uninstall it, the 2 services are still there and you get a night mare trying to remove them.

To be fair, I quit using it since Acronis 2012 so I don't know if they fix any of these problems.

And that's the reason I switch to Macrium and can confirm that I never have a single problem with it.

It is always advisable to create a Macrium Rescue USB/DVD. However, all these years I have been using Macrium and never have any problem booting.
The suggestion I made above is pretty safe since he still has the old HHD for backup and the restore the image from within Windows to another disk is also faster.
It is worth noting that there is a difference between Restore and Clone. When we clone a disk, the destination disk must be equal or greater in capacity and cloning will perform bit by bit, sector by sector copy and sometimes will create problem with disk signature collision. With restore, it does not matter if the destination disk is less than in capacity as long as the Backup image size will fit the destination disk and Macrium will attempt to align the partition size accordingly. With new version 6, if the destination disk is a SSD, Macrium will also perform trimming.

In addition, Using Macrium to fix the BCD does work well if your Windows was installed using MBR partition scheme. Not in the case with GPT style installation.