Macrium general questions

I've been using Macrium free for quite some time and in general it has worked well for me.

However, I have been unable to intsall the 1803 update so I decided to make an image of my production system and restore that image to a spare SSD. The image creation was successful and the restore to the spare SSD was successful.

My questions relate to both image creation/restore, and cloning an existing system drive.

1. Is it best to image a system drive while booted from that drive, or should I use the bootable rescure CD to make the image of my system?

2. If I clone my system drive, should I run the clone from the operating system or from the boot cd?

3. Does an image restore change the destination disks signature to that of the source disk?

4. Does a disk clone change the destination disks signature to the same as the source disk?

Thanks for your interest in my post.

Hi there.

in general it's best to make an image - especially if you have a smaller "C" drive and a "D" partition -- image everything on the "C" drive including system / hidden partitions.

When you restore this also will optimize the HDD / SSD -- i.e it will function equivantly to a "defrag" and the image is a lot smaller. Cloning is only worthwhile if you want to copy the entire HDD possibly for moving to another one. Cloning copies all blank spaces etc -- sector by sector -- although the later copies of macrium can do a reasonable amount of "Intelligent" copying.

It's always a good idea even if you only have a single HDD or SSD in your system to separate the OS from data i.e have a "C" and a "D" partition. If you then restore your system from the image you don't lose any data from the "D" partition.

Cloning or Imaging doesn't matter whether you run from the OS or a boot USB/DVD as the system will be locked by VSS against changes. Personally I'd do it from the bootable device as I wouldn't want anything to be changed while backing up or cloning even though VSS is running. Also if imaging from within windows there needs to be space for the VSS data on the disks as well as for the target image -- as I said I'd always prefer to do this from a bootable device but YMMV of course.

If you CLONE a disk then it's identical to the source Disk -- even though it might be larger - the rest will be undefined - you can adjust partitions later -- I wouldn't worry about signatures etc. Just don't have source and target online together on the same machine.

CLONE means exact replica whereas Copy doesn't imply exact replica even if the data is the same.

Note also if you use Virtual Machines and move them because of imaging / cloning - on VMWARE at the first power on of the VM say I MOVED it rather than I COPIED it -- this will preserve Windows activation if using a Windows VM.

Cheers
jimbo

Thanks for the reply jimbo. I do have a 240gb "C" drive (SSD) and a 250gb "D" data drive.
I usually image my C drive from the boot usb as well as the D drive.
What about the questions on disk signatures - questions 3 & 4. If I'm restoring to different SSD's will the disk signature of these new SSD's be changed to those of the old SSD's?

snifferpro said:

Thanks for the reply jimbo. I do have a 240gb "C" drive (SSD) and a 250gb "D" data drive.
I usually image my C drive from the boot usb as well as the D drive.
What about the questions on disk signatures - questions 3 & 4. If I'm restoring to different SSD's will the disk signature of these new SSD's be changed to those of the old SSD's?

Restore won't change HDD sigs, a Clone will of course. Bios though will recognize the hardware as different HDD's but I don't think as far as operation of your system it will make any difference -- not sure what type of software you have that actually needs the disk sig.

I've copied and imaged loads of systems over the years and I can't say I've ever come up against a "Disk Sig" problem - although I don't bother with encryption type of stuff where it might matter.

Cheers

jimbo

I have nothing that uses the disk signature other than win 10 pro itself.
In my attempts to upgrade my system to version 1803 of Win 10 I made an image of my C drive and then restored that image to a different SSD. I then made several attempts to upgrade to 1803 on the new SSD and they all fail with the same error code. I then decided to try cloning my production C drive to the new SSD and try the upgrade again. Again the update failed witht he same error. I then booted my original C drive so that I could copy some utilities over to the cloned drive and I was met with a disk signature collision. So now I have 2 SSD's with the same disk signature. Therefor the questions. I'm not 100% sure whether image or clone created the disk signature collision.

If I were to use a utility to wipe the cloned SSD and reformat it will the disk signature get changed?

Hi there
After first boot of your cloned / imaged system did you check that Windows was activated correctly.

If it wasn't you might need to sign in with Microsoft account so digital licence activation will work.

Then after running for a few hours try update check again. You don't have to do it immediately on restore.

Also before attempting update make sure you have sufficient free space --- even though the windows.old file (this gets created when system does the initial update from 1709) doesn't get that large the system will fail at allocation as it may well ask for 50 GB or more - if not available update will fail.

If you have a windows.old file remove it before attempting the update ( File explorer--C--properties--Disk clean-up system)

Cheers
jimbo

My system signs in automatically with my MS account.
I've tried the update using windows update and lastly from the ISO created with the media creation tool.
I have 139gb of free space on my C drive.
The last attempt (from iso) failed with 0x80240034 according to my update history.
I have spent hours trying to get this upgrade and every attempt fails.
I'm about ready to do a clean install using the 1803 iso but would prefer to update normally so I don't have to reinstall all my programs.
Before I clean install I will try reimaging again making sure to delete any windows.old folder, and deleting the download folder from software distribution.

Interestingly windows update just installed an update to 1709 changing version number from 402 to 431 along with microsoft Office updates. After the reboot windows update says my system is up to date. I have not tried WU again to see if it will update to 1803.
Heading to work. Will try WU again on my return.

snifferpro said:

Interestingly windows update just installed an update to 1709 changing version number from 402 to 431 along with microsoft Office updates. After the reboot windows update says my system is up to date. I have not tried WU again to see if it will update to 1803.
Heading to work. Will try WU again on my return.

Hi there
It could be that before any of the updates (1803) work all the required pre-reqs for your system have to have been installed satisfactorily.

Anyway let's know what happens after your latest try to update.

Cheers
jimbo