Restoring to a New HDD with Macrium Reflect Free: Impossible-Software Ideas?

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Like so many times in computer life, I think I’ve been living in a “Fool’s Paradise”:

I use Macrium Reflect Free, but I recently found out that:

1. I don’t have the original WIN 7 install disk
2. Reflect Free does NOT come with any partitioning software to make partitions or make them bootable.

As I am Senior-Broke most of the time, and a full Macrium Reflect is beyond me, I really have to stop and wonder just what the deuce I would do if I had a HDD crash. I think I would be up the Ganges without an air freshener.

Anyone out there have any suggestions on any free HDD partitioning software??

<facepalm>

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
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"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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If you have made a full disk image of your hard drive, not just the C: drive your OS is on, it contains the partition information in the image. You don’t need separate partitioning software.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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And as far as making the new HDD bootable…is that part of the restoration process in Macrium as well? I would think it would, as I only have one partition, C: on this machine; “D” is the CD drive (just replaced), and an external drive “E” is what I back up to in full images.

It’s been 10 years since I had an HDD go south, I remember having to separately format, partition the disk (at that time in four partitions) and make the “C” partition with the OS on it bootable.

Thanks for the info, will sleep better tonight, as this HDD has 4.5 years on it, right at the top of the failure bell curve as I understand it for 4500 RPM mechanical drives. It is a WD, tho, and I tend to trust them, as I’ve seen them go 8 years and longer.

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
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"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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The boot sector, the reserve partition, the OS partition and maybe a restore partition are included if you check all the boxes. The other partitions just don’t have drive letters assigned.

Go to:
Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management\Disk Management
You will see the disk layout. It will not hurt to write down that information (sequence, size, format, purpose) and put it away in a safe place. The Boot Record doesn’t show, but it is there in the image when you check the drive and all the partitions.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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Did so, and things pretty much look the way you described them. Have attached two screen dumps, one from Macrium in Image mode, one from Disk Management for your perusal. Looks OK to me.*

(*The first time a CEL came on in our car, I stopped it, opened the hood  and checked the engine. My wife said, “Does it look OK?” I answered, “Sure. Half of it could be missing and it would still look OK to me.”) 🙂

Many thanks!

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
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"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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In your second image, all partitions for your MBR drive C are checked. Thus, you would be able to restore everything to either your present hard drive or to a new hard drive. If you want a free way to partition hard drives, the free version of <span class=”t”>EaseUS Partition Master</span> is quite handy. I have used it for a good while now. EaseUS does include some telemetry within their free products. Yet such telemetry is limited, in the sense that they simply gather data on the basic specs of your computer and how you use their products and whether or not any software errors occur, and to occasionally send you emails about their products. This telemetry is quite tame in comparison to what telemetry Microsoft gathers. I will put it another way. I am Group B. If I wasn’t okay with the mild telemetry within the free versions of the EaseUS products, then their software would not be on my computer.

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Fire up macrium and select Restore.
Select an image.
It should show all the partitions in the backup – post a screenshot.

cheers, Paul

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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As you can see:

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
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"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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All the partitions are there and MR will happily create them when you restore.

cheers, Paul

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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You should be fine, Nibbled. If you’ve tested by booting your Macrium Rescue media and it can access the backup images on your external drive, you’ve got all you need. (You have tested that, haven’t you?)

If you really want a partition management utility, you could try the free Mini-Tool Partition Wizard and use it to create bootable rescue media for that program, as well. It’s got everything you’re likely to ever need in a partitioning utility.

But as PKCano said, you shouldn’t really need it. Macrium Reflect isn’t a full-fledged partition manager so it won’t move or resize existing partitions, but it can handle resizing a partition during the restore process — which is probably all you’d need from a dedicated partitioning utility anyway, so if Macrium can handle that, no need for a partitioning utility.

As for PKCano’s suggestion to write down details about your partition layout, note that info is already captured in the backup images you’ve already been making. You can verify that by looking at any of those images. Launch Macrium, Restore, Browse for Image, and select one of your backup images. Macrium will display its contents virtually like any other hard drive, where you’ll be able to verify the partitions, their sizes, and order, as captured by the Macrium program and stored in the image.

I don’t know if this will help, but I recently completed a video that covers some of the issues you’ve asked about. My video is actually about dual-booting so will be TMI for your needs, but if you skip over the parts about dual-booting and focus just on the parts about Macrium Reflect, you may be able to glean some background that will help you understand a little better what the program can do.

In particular, you might focus on the following topics:

• you can cherry-pick partitions at will, during the restore process
• the function of the System Reserved partition
• how to resize partitions during the restore process
• the incredible power of Macrium’s boot repair tool

Whether or not you choose to exercise these options, it’s handy to know they’re there, and when/why you might use them.

For example, suppose your HDD dies and you replace it with a larger HDD. There’s no reason to allocate any of the extra disk space to the first two partitions, so don’t enlarge them and let the OS partition alone benefit from all the extra space on the new drive.

Aside: your screenshots suggest that’s already happened before. Your first two partitions are larger than they normally ought to be, so I suspect you previously had a smaller HDD (80-100GB?) in there, and when you cloned everything to the current 320GB drive the cloning program you used proportionately resized all three partitions to fill the 320GB.

Aside: BTW, the DellUtility partition is a near-useless relic from the XP era. I wouldn’t even bother backing it up — or restoring it if you change HDDs.

 

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GoneToPlaid, Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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Just found the PUBLISHED specs on the Web (the repair and use .PDF manual did NOT have those options listed):

https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/latit/dell_latitude_e6330_spec_sheet.pdf

…and it looks like there was an option for a bigger and faster 7200 rpm/750 Gigs, which probably bucked the price up, but nothing smaller.

Sometimes buying a PC from a store can be a bit like buying a used car: “Lookit this baby! Chrome-plated fender dents, foam-lined sneeze-through wind vents, star-studded mud guards….”

But this 5400 rpm drive is as slow as mud. Probably more durable, tho.

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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All is so totally true.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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Macrium Reflect is a bare-metal, full disaster recovery program.  You don’t have to get the system to a working state first and then restore the backup to finish the process.  If you’ve done a full backup of the whole drive that stopped working, you can recover it all in one step, and you don’t need a Windows DVD or USB stick to do so.

Just be sure you have Macrium rescue media (usually a USB stick these days, but you can use optical media too if you wish) available in case anything happens.  Since things are working now, it’s a good time to create rescue media if you don’t already have it.  The Reflect software will guide you through the process, downloading the WinPE base from Microsoft and creating the whole thing for you.

That way, if the hard drive dies completely, just replace the drive, then boot from the rescue media and use that to restore the backup.  If you did a full system backup, it will handle the disk setup, partitioning, and formatting for you, including making it bootable (as others have already noted).  If the hard drive is the same size as the old one, just have it do a full restore of the disk in question and you’re good to go; if you go bigger on the new hard drive, as some people have suggested, you can use Reflect to expand the existing partitions in the image as they are being restored.

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
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Kranium, Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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dg1261 wrote:

If you really want a partition management utility, you could try the free Mini-Tool Partition Wizard and use it to create bootable rescue media for that program, as well. It’s got everything you’re likely to ever need in a partitioning utility.

… and it’s hardly unique in that regard.

There’s any number of such tools out there… that mostly differ in the user interface, also some are free and some are just plain expensive. Most Linux live-install media can double as partition management boot media if you know how.

Capability is easy to find, but ease of use for a non-expert… may not be. And might not be the same for all non-experts either, especially if you also have to consider languages…

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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but if you ever do
http://www.partitionwizard.com

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks

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[Nibbled To Death By Ducks]

Ascaris wrote:

Macrium Reflect is a bare-metal, full disaster recovery program.

In the full paid version, yes. In the Free Edition, it does not look like it: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

One needs something called ReDeploy, only available in the $70 home edition. But I still should be fine with the free version as long as I only have one “C” drive, right?

Oh, and Macrium and Win 7 Pro seem to use something called “Windows RE” instead of “PE” to create the rescue environment.

And yes, I have tested the rescue DVD, and it seems to boot and load up from the optical drive just fine.

Unfortunately, I used DVD- media, which CanadianTech insists is a no-no, that I should be using DVD+. Hm! Opinions on that one?

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

• This reply was modified 5 years, 5 months ago by Nibbled To Death By Ducks.

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Nibbled To Death By Ducks wrote:

One needs something called ReDeploy, only available in the $70 home edition.

You don’t need that to restore to bare metal.  All editions of Reflect (and all other similar backup programs, like Acronis True Image, Aomei Backupper, etc.) are capable of a bare-metal disaster recovery.  “ReDeploy” is used to tailor the restoration to the new hardware in question when the setup is so different that a standard restore operation won’t work.  This seems to be the same thing that other backup programs call “Universal restore” or something like that.

For simple backup and restoration of your PC, you won’t need that feature.

But I still should be fine with the free version as long as I only have one “C” drive, right?

Yes, that will work for you.  It would also work for you if you had multiple drives, though, as long as the intent of the restoration would be simply to get back to where you were before the disaster, not to restore the image to substantially different hardware.

I do wish the paid edition of Reflect was cheaper for home users.  It’s way more expensive than any of the versions of Acronis True Image I bought over the years.  It’s great that they offer a free edition (which Acronis does not), but it is good to support the devs where possible.  For me, the most compelling features of the full edition would have been encrypted backup images and the ability to create incremental images.

I’ve had backup programs that had universal restore, but I’ve never had any occasion to use it.  I’ve done bare-metal restores on numerous occasions, but the standard restore has always been enough for the relatively minor hardware changes (like a bigger hard disk) that I’ve had.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
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Thanks, Ascaris. Sorry to be laggy with responses, but came down this AM with a nice little Rotovirus; the Flu shot won’t protect you from that, so it’s liquids and honeyed-tea today.

Anyway, that’s good to know; I was not clear on the distinctions on the two types of “Bare Metal” restoration. If this thing went, I might just get the old slowpoke 5400 rpm it came with…can’t figger out why they put such a slow drive in an “Enterprise” model, save, as noted above, it looks like this second-hand laptop I’m currently using may have had something faster in it before. Of it’s life previous to 2 years ago I am only aware of what I was told by the previous owner, which did not include that info. If the drive DID keel over, I would maybe be tempted to put in a faster one, but the old “like for like” rule is usually best, I’ve found…at least in cars.

I used Terabyte’s IFD for my old XP workstation, but it was horribly slow on this machine (even with SATA), and I decided to try Macrium, and it ran like lightning w/USB 3.0. It IS too bad about the home user $$, but looking at the Euro-vs. Dollar exchange rate, that may have something to do with it.

Not to “pit one against the other”, which would be uncivil, I only ask for opinions on the DVD+ or DVD- thing. Are DVD-‘s truly more prone to errors in your experience, and therefore unsuitable for backup/emergency media? If so, I’m going to have to do some shopping…I got a whole stack of these DVD-‘s for next to nothing. I may have to go a-bargain hunting…

Again, thanks for the help!

 

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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Sorry, that S/B “Norovirus”. I really do think the “Roto” should be appropriate somewhere at the CDC, as well, er, enough said.

Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty

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I don’t really know about the types of media. For something like a bootable rescue disc, I would not worry about it much… worst case, you will have to make another one when it is time to restore.  There would be convenience loss if the disc failed at a bad time, but not data loss.  By contrast, any disc you are using for the actual backup set must not fail, or there will be data loss if that backup set is ever needed.

I have not used optical media in quite some time, and when I did, I bought on price more than anything else.  I did a ton of writing CDs back in the day, but not many DVDs (and I have never had a Blu-ray drive).  I have had failures, but I never tried to correlate them with a media type.

I would be a little sketchy on trusting any optical media for important backups, personally.  For a redundant backup, certainly (I have triple redundant backups for my PCs on hard drives… the more, the merrier).

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
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