XIII, As jphughan mentioned, a UFD is the easiest and most reliable way to boot into the recovery environment. But if you want to be adventurous you could have a bootable USB external HD. The USB HD boots into your recovery environment and it also contains your backup images. To make the external HD bootable, create an appropriate sized partition on the HD (a second partition) and copy the files/folders from your bootable USB flash drive to this partition. Set the partition Active. Now that partition boots just like your UFD. Choose the USB entry in the BIOS boot menu.
You're right about the schedules. I backed up (exported and imported) the schedules also. I forgot to mention that.
This works, and actually Rescue Media Builder will handle the partitioning and "active" designation for you as long as you have enough free space on the disk. You can also do this with GPT disks, but you'll need to create the FAT32 partition manually (no need to mark it as active since that doesn't exist for GPT disks), and you'd have to copy the files to the partition manually since Rescue Media Builder doesn't support building to GPT targets. I believe that's because although MBR disks can support both Legacy BIOS and UEFI booting, GPT disks only support UEFI, and Macrium is going for broader compatibility. However, in either of these cases, be aware that not all PCs support booting from USB fixed disk class storage devices like spinning hard drives and SSDs. Some only support booting from USB removable storage class devices, so you'd have to experiment.
I deleted folders C:\ProgramData\Macrium\Reflect\Windows Kits (466mB) and C:\ProgramData\Macrium\Reflect\Windows AIK (9mB), MR and BootMenu work fine. pe10_1709x64.zip (463mB) available on another partition hard disk.
They'll both continue to work fine, but the next time you want to rebuild/update your Rescue Media, you'll be prompted to download the PE files again or supply that zip file. And either way, those WinPE files you deleted will end up right back there. If you want to see that without waiting for a Reflect update, open Rescue Media Builder, hold Ctrl, and then click the arrow that will appear within the Build button and chose "Force WIM Rebuild". Unless of course you use WinRE from now on, in which case you won't need the WinPE files at all anymore, including that zip file.
@aldist , @jphughan , @TheRollbackFrog Many thanks for all your helpful replies. I will keep my existing rescue stick and create a new one in v7.2. I like the belt and braces approach suggested by jph!
Unfortunately not on my ancient PC. After booting the UFD with the rescue image the screen turns black and nothing else seems to happen. When I copied all files from the UFD to the hard drive in my PC and fiddled with Grub4DOS (my default setup does not work) it did boot from HD though. Unfortunately the resolution still is 1600x1200 (max) instead of 2560x1440. Can I include a video driver in the rescue image?
Have you successfully booted anything from a flash drive on this old PC? If it's really old it might not support booting from UFDs at all, in which case I guess burn a disc (use a DVD-RW for easy updating), but if you know your PC can boot from a UFD, then it's strange to me that the exact same file set would boot from your hard drive but not a UFD. You built the UFD directly through Rescue Media Builder rather than manually setting it up, correct? If so, try a different UFD. Some flash drives seem not to work well for booting, at least with some systems. As for resolution, Rescue Media runs on Windows PE/RE, and Windows PE/RE doesn’t support loading "external" video drivers. As I said above, the resolution option(s) available would depend on your system and possibly GPU firmware. You can try enabling the "Legacy EFI screen resolution" option in Rescue Media Builder if you're booting in UEFI mode, although you're probably not on an "ancient" PC, and that option is intended for systems that are otherwise locked at 640x480 anyway, so I doubt it will make a difference in your case. But honestly even 1600x1200 is way more resolution than you actually need for Rescue. Macrium designed the Rescue UI to be usable down to 800x600, which is a quarter of that resolution. If the issue is that your display is stretching that 4:3 resolution out to 16:9, you can probably fix that through the settings on the display itself without affecting how things work when the display is receiving a 2560x1440 signal.
XIII, You aren't really limited to 4 primary partitions on a MBR disk. You can have over 100 with BootIt Bare Metal. I have more than ten PE/RE/rescue partitions on my SSD, including a Macrium partition. The maximum video resolution when booted into the Macrium partition is 1920*1200 but the default 1024*768 looks better. Edit... Macrium on the SSD boots three times faster than Macrium on the flash drive.
Something is going on there, as the Windows 1809 ISO did also not fully boot (got stuck on blue Windows flag), on 2 different flash drives. However, if I remember well the Ubuntu 18.10 installer worked fine. Might have to double check this... It's actually so ancient that is does not even support UEFI; only the old (nowadays legacy) BIOS... Still that's my main machine, until Apple releases an updated iMac...
If a garden variety Win10 1809 install environment doesn't boot, then Rescue Media based on WinRE 10 1809 is highly unlikely to boot either. In that case you can always try using WinPE 10, which will drop you to 1709, or potentially even going down to WinPE 5 if you don't need any of the functionality that WinPE 10 offers (summarized in the Choose Base WIM tab).
As a follow up, letting you know this works exactly as I need it to. Thanks for your part in making it happen.
You can boot Macrium from a GPT disk too... https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/bootit-uefi.405427/page-6#post-2795852
True, but Rescue Media Builder doesn’t support targeting GPT devices, so you’d have to do it manually. I’ve also noticed that some Dell systems will only boot from the first partition of USB devices set up as GPT, even though they’ll happily boot from other partitions on that same device when it’s set up as MBR. That was annoying because I wanted an NTFS partition to be first in order to keep that partition accessible from older Windows versions that didn’t support multi-partition flash drives — but of course UEFI systems seldom support booting from FAT32 partitions
jphughan, I was referring to booting from internal GPT disks and I understand it has to be setup manually. It's obviously not for everyone but as I'd do one thousand restores for software issues to one restore for disk failure, it benefits me.
Hm. The WinRE ISO on a DVD does not boot either. BSOD; error code 0x0000225 \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe is missing? (The WinPE ISO boots fine from DVD)
v 7.2.3906 has been released. https://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v7/v7.2.3906/details7.2.3906.htm A compulsory Windows restart is unavoidable. HTH
Can you boot from the regular Windows Recovery partition on your system? If not, then you won't be able to use WinRE because Reflect uses the WIM file on that partition as a starting point for WinRE Rescue Media. But if you're running Win10 1809 on your system, which means your Recovery partition would be based on WinRE 10 1809, and you can't boot Win10 1809 install media either, then maybe 1809 just isn't a good choice for your PC? In any case, unless you need WiFi support, WinPE 10 should be functionally identical.
After updating to latest version, something changed with update check. I have all update options disabled, still today I got notification that Macrium wants to connect to their server when scheduled backup was started. Maybe it's a new bug introduced by latest update?
Interesting. Reflect has never performed update checks during scheduled backups. If that functionality has been added, then I suppose there could be an issue that the new update check routine isn’t observing user preferences, but I’d also have expected that capability to have been mentioned in the release notes. My guess is that the connection may have been related to licensing. I know Macrium can reset activations on a given license key in cases where you might have reused your key without remembering to deactivate the old installation that may no longer exist, so maybe they have Reflect installations check the validity of their licenses periodically to make sure that those old installations don’t stay active. To be clear, the latter half of that sentence is a guess.
