Imaging Win10

J

Jeff Gaines 1 year ago

Imaging Win10

I have discovered that Ventoy offers both a UEFI and non-UEFI menu if the computer's BIOS allows legacy mode, that made today's tasks much easier! (tips hat to SH...)

I have tried the following for imaging the OS drive:

Windows Windows own tool for creating an image works but is desperately slow. Using it to restore the image was a total disaster. I had a legacy/MBR setup with the NVMe partitioned into "C" and "D" drives. Windows restore deleted the whole NVMe, converted it to GPT/UEFI then installed Windows. It lost all my data, all my apps and one complete partition. Total disaster.

Macrium free version (not a trial of the latest version but the old free version). Couldn't make any sense of it, I chose a source and a destination but ended up going round in circles so gave up. It seemed to be saying I had included the destination in the source but I really couldn't see the problem.

Clonezilla The installation instructions I found yesterday said download the zip file and copy to a thumbdrive when it will boot. Not true, today I found different instructions which say download the iso and use Rufus to set up a thumbdrive which worked. (side issue but every time AI answers a question it gives a different answer, anybody else noticed that?) I am proud to say I did manage to create a backup with it to a USB drive! I do have a Linux box, but only use it to create iso files from DVDs using graphical tools. Clonezilla uses text screens with raw Linux terms, some of which I nearly understood. Having made the classic mistake of mixing source and destination I finally ended up with an image but it was slow. I haven't tried to restore it.

Acronis 2018 I used the recovery option with this as I have used it for many years and know my way around. For a legacy/MBR install of Windows it works very well and is reasonably quick for both creating an image and restoring it. I plan to stick with it.

Miscellany I did about 5 or 6 fresh installs of Windows 10 today each time I messed up. I discovered (or re-discovered):

If your BIOS has a built in key Windows will install an appropriate version for that key, makes sense but I wanted Pro and got Home. I then remembered you need to put a "ei.cfg" file in the "Choices" directory on the install iso and it will give you the option of which version to install.

On the Asus Z170 mobo you have to disconnect every single drive except the one you want to install to otherwise it just won't install and it doesn't give intelligible error messages. I tried 3 different install options before I remembered this.

Vote

P

Paul 1 year ago

The 27th page has two diagrams. But I'm going to shut down now and add a drive to make the picture more obvious.

formatting link

I hooked up a separate drive (my backup drive) to take this picture.

[Picture]

formatting link

You put the backup on a separate drive, so if the original drive dies, you have a backup. If you store the backup within a partition that is being backed up, that is a "logical loop", even though the software can manage that perfectly well. It could do that, because it's a cluster based backup program, using VSS snapshots for freezing the state of a partition. That means it can "ignore" the MRIMG file it would be writing to that partition. It is still considered bad practice to be doing such things.

An operation, no matter how complex, goes into a single MRIMG file. If you do as I do, and on Backup Day, you define multiple backup sessions, that's so I can have a one-to-one relationship between a named MRIMG file and the disk it will be restoring. If I need to restore Disk 3, I will be using "Disk3.mrimg".

If you have four drives connected, one is the backup drive, three are the "normal machine drives", you tick the three normal machine drives but you do not tick the backup drive. When selecting the destination, you select the partition on the backup drive that normally holds the backups. That's when you can use the button over on the top left, to "back up the whole machine". But the whole machine is defined by the tick boxes you tick. And three drives, are being backed to the BACKUP drive in that case.

When you use the image button located under each drive row, you are designating the drive next to the button for backup. The ticky boxes on the partitions, are for selecting what portion of the drive needs backing. For example, I don't back up the large partition on the end, as often as the others.

By now, I think we can agree that Windows 7 Backup is verboten. Only the dev who wrote it, and the devs mom, use that application :-)

Paul

Vote

W

wasbit 1 year ago

My notes on free Image/OS migration programmes.

I have used all 4 programmes previously with great success but the DiskGenius & Hasleo Disk Clone GUIs make things very easy.

Imaging/OS Migration

Some of the popular free programmes will only image a partition, not a complete drive, whilst other have size limits. Just something to watch out for.

Clonezilla -

formatting link

(D) -

formatting link

Disk Clone -

formatting link

Reflect Free -

formatting link

Acronis True Image, Paragon Drive Copy need the non freeware versions.

Hasleo also do a well recommended Backup Suite - Hasleo Backup Suite -

formatting link

Vote

S

s|b 1 year ago

v8.0.7783 is the last free version, but still works on W10 and W11.

You were trying to save the image on the same partition. Source and destination can't be the same. You can create an image while Windows (source) is running, but you need to save the image to another partition or hdd (not Windows; destination).

Vote

J

Jeff Gaines 1 year ago

I was trying to save an image of my OS drive to a USB drive but working with SDA, SDB etc. is very confusing!

Vote

T

The Natural Philosopher 1 year ago

~/Desktop$ lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi ├─sda2 8:2 0 1K 0 part └─sda5 8:5 0 238G 0 part / sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom

Vote

S

s|b 1 year ago

You're talking about something else. Macrium Reflect doesn't behave like that. You can install the program under Windows and run it under Windows. You'll need to create Rescue Media (on a flash drive for instance) to restore the image.

Vote

J

Jeff Gaines 1 year ago

You're right I think that was Clonezilla, after half a dozen installs and trying 3 or 4 imaging apps it was all pretty confusing! I will stick to Acronis True Image because I am used to that and it is fine for Legacy/MBR installs which is what I have been working on today.

Vote

P

Paul 1 year ago

Actually, at one time, the Macrium Reflect Rescue CD was Linux based! There was a 20MB or so ISO file, stored inside the installer on older versions of Macrium.

It changed to WADK/WinPE/WinRE based later on.

Similarly, the Macrium, running on Windows, can back up EXT partitions. It's unknown whether the newly introduced C12 option/flag for EXT4, causes grief for any of the free Macrium versions. The newer distros may have C12 enabled by default, instead of making it optional.

When Cygwin tools refer to storage on Windows, they use /dev/sda and /dev/sdb to reference things. Like disktype.exe for Cygwin.

The port of dd made by a third party for Windows (dd.exe), uses \\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 and \\?\Device\Harddisk1\Partition0 to reference things.

While other Windows namespaces for storage, are on a web page that documents such things. UNC and the like.

Clonezilla works on Linux, but like Windows 7 Backup on W10/W11, it exposes the user to a lot of details.

And the Windows 16MB partition, is the frictional element in a lot of cases, as at least some tools do not like NoFS partitions.

Paul

Vote

S

Smolley 1 year ago

I use the free version of Drive Snapshot and have dozens of different configured images. The disk image of the original Win10 2019 Server install has been ported around 7 or 8 computers. The only proviso is that the system disk space is the same on all computers.

Vote

R

Raj Kundra 1 year ago

Been using Paid Acronis since 2012 and upgraded to all version to 2021 now.

Done 1000's images and restores without any problem.

Got 10 external 1TB USB SSD drives with 100's of images of different Laptop, Tablets and PC etc.

Best trick is to make bottable Acronis ISO image using Acronis Tools, Then make about 10GB FAT 32 partition on your external USB drive and rest NTFS or anything you like (for Images). Then just burn Acronis ISO on that 10GB partition. Just boot from the USB drive and make as many images or restore you want to do.

If you need bootable Acronis ISO image for a USB drive send me message.

Vote

Imaging Win10

Join the Discussion

Didn't find your answer?