Macrium Free --Restore to totally different hardware --Working !!!

Hi there
Macrium Free version is also brilliant at restoring to totally different hardware.
This method can be used pretty well where there's different hardware involved or creating V2P (a Virtual to Physical conversion) whatever VM system you are running.

You can't get much more different hardware than this:

Source : a QEMU / KVM Windows 10 VM on a Linux Host running with an AMD x4321 CPU (opteron I think)

The VM had virtio disk drive, virtio network adapter and virtio display.

Target - HP envy laptop intel CPU with intel graphics.

Method (sounds like a cookery book !!)

1) Inside the VM attach USB device and run macrium to create a system image

2) on the target machine connect the USB device where you stored the image and a bootable macrium rescue media.

3) delete ALL the target partitions from the target (if you dual boot then delete the Windows partitions -- I haven't tested this scenario in dual boot as I never need to. (By dual boot I mean dual boot from internal HDD's - not booting OS's from external USB drives etc).

4) Run Restore image -- Important -- do not boot the restored image yet -- reboot the computer with the macrium rescue drive again.

5) now choose fix boot problems --and choose the W10 installation from the dropdown --it will re-create the bcd etc.

6) Now re-boot computer again - Windows should boot.

You will probably need to apply some updates e.g display driver but Windows updates will find most of them -- for the display though I had to go into device manager and click om update for the "basic Ms display driver" - Windows then loaded the correct Intel display driver and HDMI audio driver.

7) after updating etc you will probably need to re-activate windows (and possibly Office if you had that installed on the VM).

Job done.

(Re-size partitions if you want to afterwards since your VM probably will have a smaller "C" partition than a typical "Physical" installation).

You don't need the pro version of Macrium or other fiddly methods --especially for those wanting a Virtual to Physical (V2P) conversion - and on different hardware. Note also the VMWare method of doing a V"P conversion is hideous and doesn't work properly -- not only that it takes forever. !!!

Well done Macrium --I know this was always a feature in the pro product - but it works too in the free one using method above.

I can't guarantee this will work in 100% of cases for every conceivable bit of hardware out there but I suspect that it will be good in at least 95% of cases.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
Macrium Free version is also brilliant at restoring to totally different hardware.
This method can be used pretty well where there's different hardware involved or creating V2P (a Virtual to Physical conversion) whatever VM system you are running.

You can't get much more different hardware than this:

Source : a QEMU / KVM Windows 10 VM on a Linux Host running with an AMD x4321 CPU (opteron I think)

The VM had virtio disk drive, virtio network adapter and virtio display.

Target - HP envy laptop intel CPU with intel graphics.

Method (sounds like a cookery book !!)

1) Inside the VM attach USB device and run macrium to create a system image

2) on the target machine connect the USB device where you stored the image and a bootable macrium rescue media.

3) delete ALL the target partitions from the target (if you dual boot then delete the Windows partitions -- I haven't tested this scenario in dual boot as I never need to. (By dual boot I mean dual boot from internal HDD's - not booting OS's from external USB drives etc).

4) Important -- do not boot the restored image yet -- reboot the computer with the macrium rescue drive again.

5) now choose fix boot problems --and choose the W10 installation from the dropdown --it will re-create the bcd etc.

6) Now re-boot computer again - Windows should boot.

You will probably need to apply some updates e.g display driver but Windows updates will find most of them -- for the display though I had to go into device manager and click om update for the "basic Ms display driver" - Windows then loaded the correct Intel display driver and HDMI audio driver.

7) after updating etc you will probably need to re-activate windows (and possibly Office if you had that installed on the VM).

Job done.

(Re-size partitions if you want to afterwards since your VM probably will have a smaller "C" partition than a typical "Physical" installation).

You don't need the pro version of Macrium or other fiddly methods --especially for those wanting a Virtual to Physical (V2P) conversion - and on different hardware. Note also the VMWare method of doing a V"P conversion is hideous and doesn't work properly -- not only that it takes forever. !!!

Well done Macrium --I know this was always a feature in the pro product - but it works too in the free one using method above.

I can't guarantee this will work in 100% of cases for every conceivable bit of hardware out there but I suspect that it will be good in at least 95% of cases.

Cheers
jimbo

What you have described is down to Windows 10 handling hardware changes not Macrium Reflect Free. The Redeploy feature works differently.

With redeploy, you restore an image backup and then boot from Reflect in winpe mode and run the redeploy feature which then updates hardware drivers based on its library of drivers, or ones you have told it to use.

It is because of W10s superior handling of hardware change, you rarely need to use the redeploy feature anymore.

The paid for version also has the Redeploy to New Hardware feature which may be useful in circumstances where the method you posted fails