Macirum Reflect storage question

Thanks Bree. Yes I beleive that Disk 1 was my original hard drive.
Ok in the AM I will open the case, and disconnect drive 1.
Just finished a Belgin White Ale, and know better than to fool with my computer innards

Disconnected the F drive, and everything operated ok. Think I should reformat this drive once I reconnect it.
Created the rescue Media
Added Macrium to my boot menue
Backed up, and verified the OS files OK

Still trying to find out how to verify that I can boot up with the USB memory stick with the rescue media.

smalltown said:

Disconnected the F drive, and everything operated ok. Think I should reformat this drive once I reconnect it....

Alternatively you could use MiniTool Partition Wizard to delete F: and expand G: should you have data on G: you want to keep.

Still trying to find out how to verify that I can boot up with the USB memory stick with the rescue media.

Depends on your machine, for most you need to do a full start up from cold ( a Restart will do that) and select the bios one-time boot menu (usually that's the F12 key) or enter the bios (usually F2) and set the usb ahead of the hdd in the boot order.

Changed the boot order to first boot device to USB-HDD, and I boot right from C drive without any hesitation.
The options I have for USB boot are USB-FDD, USB-CDROM, USB-HDD
Maybe I should try creating another rescue media ?

smalltown said:

The options I have for USB boot are USB-FDD, USB-CDROM, USB-HDD...

Is this for the Gigabyte motherboard in your specs? See if this helps...

Enable USB Boot in Gigabyte Motherboard - blackMORE Ops

...or this.

GA-EP45-UD3R - cannot boot from USB Flash Drive

Yes it is the Gigabyte in my specs.
Followed the links and found the menu they where talking about.
Tried time after time without success.
Decided to at least try another USB to see if it would try to boot to that (even though it does not have the Macrium on it)
It's one of those USB sticks that has the slide on the side. Found the slide had slid back so I was not making a good connection to the USB connector.
At this point I can see the needed menu and select my USB stick for booting, but when it tries to boot it goes into a loop.
Will try setting up new rescue on another USB stick.

What would my screen look like if the USB rescue stick works as expected ?
I have the dual boot menu set up, (win 10 or Macrium) but I am hesitate to select it fearing I will over write my C drive.

Anyway I am getting ther albiet slowly !

smalltown said:

What would my screen look like if the USB rescue stick works as expected ?

Almost identical to the Macium screen within Windows, except it opens to the Restore tab. It runs in a Windows RE/PE environment with a taskbar of its own. Here's a screenshot of it in action, where I am connecting to a network drive after booting the Macrium rescue media.



You said earlier you had added Macrium to the boot menu. If you want to see what to expect, that boots identically to the rescue media (except, a bit faster).

Ok I'm in whew. Those old links helped a lot.
That USB stick with the slide seems to have been my issue/problem.
I took a different USB stick, made new rescue media. With this new stick Macrium auto selected mbr/uefi, and formatted the stick. With the bad stick it did not. If I manually selected mbr/uefi with the problem stick, Macrium returned an error message about partitioning.
With the new stick Macrium formatted it ok, and I am able to boot into the Macrium menu.

I do need to change the boot menu each time to boot to the USB stick.

I realized that I need to boot into Macrium using the USB stick then connect the external USB dive, and select my drive and image file.

Do you think that I done enough testing ?
Thinking I should consider backing up my data files also.

smalltown said:

Ok I'm in whew. Those old links helped a lot....

With the new stick Macrium formatted it ok, and I am able to boot into the Macrium menu.
I do need to change the boot menu each time to boot to the USB stick.

You should be able to get a one-time boot menu at start up that allows you to choose the boot device. Insert the usb, power up and keep hitting the appropriate key. For Gigabyte that seems to be F12.
Boot keys for GigaByte

Do you think that I done enough testing ?

I think you have earned another Belgian White Ale

The ultimate test would be to do a restore for real, do you have a spare drive you could use to test that? Something for another day, perhaps....

Thinking I should consider backing up my data files also.

My motto is that you can never have enough backups