But should I be using WinPE 11 for imaging Windows 10? I've checked Device Manager and I see this: And I'm getting high speeds in Windows when copying big files from internal drive to external drive connected to USB 3.1 port. I think I've never done a live image, I guess I should try it in order to really test the possible speed. I'll try this when I have a bit more time on my hands. Thank you for now.
Rescue Media doesn’t care what version of Windows is installed on the disk you’re imaging. It’s just files and data blocks, so there’s no requirement to match versions there. It can be beneficial to match kernel versions if your Rescue Media needs additional drivers to support your hardware, in which case the matching kernel makes it most likely that Rescue Media Builder can copy drivers right out of Windows rather than you needing to supply them. On the other hand, newer Windows kernels have broader hardware support built-in, making it less likely that supplemental drivers will be needed in the first place. You can always perform a Rescue Media build on WinPE 11 and switch back to 10 later. Your PC will keep both builds cached, or you can delete whichever one you decide you don’t want. Large file copies may not be exactly the same since they won’t involve compression and possibly encryption as Reflect can use, and won’t be using Reflect’s engine. So I’d still suggest an image test. Another option you can try is running CrystalDiskMark in both environments to benchmark your storage device, since I believe the portable version of that application still runs in WinPE.
I see, got it about Rescue Media. If I run CrystalDiskMark on the external drive when booting into PE, will that test the USB connection speed? I think it will just test the drive speed itself, or not?
If the drive is an NVMe SSD connected via USB, then its performance would be bottlenecked by USB, so the test would still be relevant. The goal is to perform the same tests in full Windows and WinPE, and Reflect image backups and CrystalDiskMark are both applications that can perform relevant tests in both environments.
As of lately, I seem to be frequently getting a BSOD on restore of X-made images. These are difficult to cope with as most boot restore tricks do not work. Anybody familiar with such a behavior? I'm on Win 11 Pro x64, 24H2, MR latest update. My hardware is Lenovo Desktop PC P2. What's the optimal way to restore the boot data in such cases, and why may this be happening in the first place?
I don't have an answer for you... BUT, there are a ton of W11 24H2 issues floating around the infobahn and they seem to be affecting most everything. What might the BSOD error code be? Personally I'm avoiding my 23H2 to 24H2 upgrade until all this 24H2 dust settles.
The error code was INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE. But it doesn't seem to be a 23H2-related problem. Having successfully restored an earlier version of my system imaged by v 8.1, I uninstalled MR X (10.0.8406) and returned to MR 8.1.8325. Since then, everything works smoothly, no BSODs, clean restores, clean booting. Could be some kind of bug in v 10 not reading properly my booting pattern by my new hardware? My drive C is on a M.2 NVMe Samsung 1TB SSD disk.
That error can occur if you change storage interface types by either changing the storage device, storage controller, or the BIOS-configured mode. For example, restoring an image from a SATA device to NVMe or vice versa, adding/removing/changing a physical RAID controller, or switching your system between AHCI mode and RAID/RST mode. The fix in those cases is to run ReDeploy. However, if you’re restoring images onto the same storage device they were originally captured from and no BIOS changes were made between the time of the image and now, then I’m not sure why that issue would be occurring.
All this happens with the current system hardware configuration, so there is no chance of whatever remnants or system orphans from the past which could cause conflict. This is a new system and I have not changed any hardware since buying it, short of adding two other M.2 NVMe disks to empty slots and two SATA HDDs from previous machine. I have dug deeper into this trying to determine what happens. ReDeploy didn't help with this, neither did MR's boot fix, sorry to say that. And I tried to create Macrium Rescue ISO in both main flavors - as WinPE, and also as WinRE. When creating these in latest version 8.1, they have both shown all drivers the system loads and all were (obviously) correctly and automatically included in the ISO. On the other hand, when creating a bootable ISO in latest version 10, two or three drivers (supposedly needed for M.2 NVMe booting drive) were shown, but they were accompanied with a red icon of a crossed zero indicating that they can not be packed into the ISO. And they probably were not as the system failed to boot on image restore. As if version 10 had some inherent problems to deal with this; surprisingly, earlier version 8.1 coped with this with flying colors. On another take, I selected these drivers manually but to no avail. Image backup made in MR X 10 still failed (and fails) to boot, notwithstanding.
Drivers being loaded into Rescue Media or not would not affect whether images restored using that Rescue Media will boot, since Rescue Media is independent of the data contained in the image. Rescue Media drivers only affect whether the Rescue Media itself can work with the hardware. If your Rescue Media was able to access the boot storage device to perform a restore, that would suggest to me that the necessary drivers were available. Then again, the restore doesn’t result in a bootable system, so maybe there’s an issue with an incorrect driver leading to bad results? I remember a few cases where Rescue Media would indicate that it had all necessary drivers loaded for a storage controller but nonetheless didn’t work with that storage properly until a different driver was manually introduced. It might be interesting to share exactly which drivers are being called out by Rescue Media Builder rather than just saying “two or three drivers (supposedly needed for M.2 NVMe booting drive)”. Maybe a screenshot? I’m definitely curious on this one, particularly since it’s typically the WinRE/PE choice that would be responsible for any driver differences, and not the Reflect application version.
Currently, I do not have MR 10 installed as it turned out that images made with it would make my system unbootable and were returning nasty BSOD, where no known tricks of restoring the boot data worked. I am absolutely positive about this as I replicated this problem many times. Only images made with MR 8.1 were capable of being restored correctly. It took me a great deal of effort to make my system up and running again, and I almost thought that nothing short of a new and clean Win 11 install would work, thus losing all my painstakingly configured and tuned-up system. But I can identify these NVMe drivers in MR 8.1 Rescue applet - see the enclosed screenshot. In MR 10 all three had a red crossed zero instead of a green checkmark. Do I know why? No, I don't. Could this be the reason for failed boot? Possibly. I have uninstalled MR 10 and prefer to skip the next few MR 10 updates to possibly try it again, but I am not keen to do that any time soon. Current state of MR 10 just doesn't seem to work for me. MR 8.1 works smoothly.
That is the basic Microsoft NVMe driver that has been included in the native driver library since WinPE/RE 4.0 that shipped with Windows 8. Having a driver issue there seems very strange. But if you’re unable/unwilling to troubleshoot further at this point, I guess there’s nothing further to be done.
What kind of troubleshooting you have in mind? Why is it that MR 8.1 creates images that I restore cleanly, whilst MR 10-made images fail to restore on my system? No other system adjustments have been made by me in the meantime. I'd love to define the culprit responsible for this, but I am not keen to reinstall MR 10 at this stage. I'm glad this is behind me... But assuming I would reinstall it, what further steps would you anticipate me to make?
I’d want to dig more into the Devices & Drivers issue, verify the exact WinPE and RE versions you’re using (not mentioned earlier), see if force rebuilding the WIM file or blowing away the cached build files changes anything, and see what your Rescue Media reports for hardware support under Restore > View Unsupported Devices. Or even if you don’t reinstall VX, if you’ve still got a Rescue Media build of it somewhere (this is where it can be handy to generate Rescue Media ISO files…), you could possibly work with Macrium Support directly to root cause whatever is going on, since you’d be able to switch between VX Rescue Media and V8 Rescue Media to create image backups using each one. You could even find out if using your VX Rescue Media to restore a backup that was created by your V8 Rescue Media works differently than using it to restore a backup created by VX. That would isolate the problem to the backup phase vs. restore phase, which it’s not clear has been done yet. In fact it’s not clear if you ever made a backup from VX Rescue as opposed to only within Windows, which could potentially be another useful data point. If a backup made from within Rescue restores properly, it could point to an issue with Reflect VX’s new VSS provider that was developed to enable the new exclusion functionality in image backups. Earlier Reflect versions used the standard Microsoft VSS provider, and Rescue doesn’t use VSS at all. I assume you’ve got active support through Macrium given that every VX license comes with at least 1 year of support and it just launched. That’s just off the top of my head.
This could indicate the root of my problem. Maybe this doesn't cause problems on other systems but it does on mine. And since I do not really care about exclusions, at least for the time being I'll stick with my V8. Currently, I wouldn't like to spend on this too much time as I'm pretty happy with the features as well as speed that V8 offers on M.2 NVMe drives - 183GB drive C gets packed into a 110GB full image backup in 1 to 2 minutes time! Absolutely awesome! VX still needs some polishing, so I guess I'll give it a rain check until they iron out its teething problems... All my backups were created from within Windows. And yes, backup created by V8 can indeed be restored on my machine using Rescue disk made by VX - this is how I finally sorted out my boot problem restoring one by one my numerous VX-made image backups until I finally got to earlier backups made with V8 and this finally worked. No other things worked to correct the booting problem - neither ReDeploy, nor different boot repair tricks and fixes. My fault was that I didn't test-restore backups made with VX until I really needed it, which is when I found out that they all fail.
I decided to make a test full image backup of my drive C outside of Windows, from MR RescueMedium VX 10.0.8406-WinRE. After next loading of Windows, I again booted MR from the same bootable ISO RescueMedium and restored my image properly and 100%. No booting problems whatsoever! So I guess, this confirms your assumption of the new VSS Provider of VX being the culprit of my booting problems.
An interesting question came to my head, where I'd welcome your opinion, jphughan. When I couldn't restore my images created by installed VX from within Windows, which all ultimately failed, would it have made difference if I had made a new full image backup of my system from the VX bootable Rescue Medium, and next had restored it by the same? Would it have made my system bootable? Never tried this, but if I did and it would have worked, I could have saved some 3 weeks of lost system changes and personalized fine-tuning. The data I have not lost, as it was accessible in the browse mode from a bootable VX Rescue Medium.
Great info, thanks for posting that. I totally understand not wanting to spend even more time using a setup that is problematic, but I think if you were willing to consider it, there’s a very good chance Macrium would be able to work with you to root cause this. And depending on the nature of the problem, the fix might have benefits that apply to far more people. But in terms of your question, it sounds like you’re asking if you could have used Rescue Media to make an image backup of your system while it was in an unbootable state, and then restored that image to regain a bootable system? If that’s the question, then I don’t think that would have worked at all. If my theory about the VSS provider is correct, then the problem would be that some boot-critical data wasn’t being captured in the images you were making from Windows. So if you restore that image and it doesn’t boot, then I don’t see how making a new image of an already-broken system and restoring that image would improve anything. Using Rescue Media may be able to avoid creating a problem in the first place, but I don’t think it would be able to fix something that was already broken.
Good point. And a logical one. Thanks for your support and advice. I will contact MR and will bring this situation to their attention so that they can come up with a fix, once they determine that there's indeed a problem that may affect a lot of users. Maybe not everyone, but perhaps in case of some particular hardware configuration. Kudos to you!
I took a chance to again reinstall VX, but the problematic restores continued. I noticed that they never happened when restoring from the MR Windows Boot Menu, but they did from bootable USB disks. What causes such a behavior, I don't know. Being rather fed-up with such an unreliable performance, I stopped using VX for the time being and restored the PC back to the time of my functional V8. This went smoothly and V8 has never failed me. My VX was anyway in the trial mode only and its performance has not convinced me that it worked for me better than my licensed V8. I guess, I'll wait for new VX updates and may carefully try them later. But I don't understand that my V8 clearly sees my drivers needed for proper booting from M.2 NVMe SSD disk, whilst VX misses them. And this is where the problem probably lies. The VX in its latest incarnation simply doesn't work with my hardware configuration, I had to accept that. Currently, I am not keen in investing into this issue any more time as it was all just disappointment.
Somewhat related, I've never been able to create a bootable CD/DVD with v8.1.8325 (last version of v8 ) that was capable of seeing any drive in my external Plugable docking station. A CD created with a previous v8.1 version works fine restoring any image created with any version of MR and is what I use. Hasleo, which is in my view superior to MR VX, improving at a much faster rate than MR, and is free; has no problem restoring images from the aforementioned docking station using a CD created from any version of Hasleo I've used. (I also refuse to make regular payments in perpetuity to use a disk imaging program. If fact, I think it is downright stupid when better and more rapidly improving software is available for free.)
Can it "co-exist" with MR V8? Can I install it to test it with V8 installed? Would both remain functional?
If by "it" you are referring to Hasleo, yes, there is no problem at all having both MR and Hasleo installed and operational at the same time. If you are referring to MR VX, I think the same answer applies, but I really don't know.
I mean V8. I have uninstalled VX and have not returned to it due to the problems I had with its restores.
