Macrium Reflect Free 7.3 imaged to USB flash drive produced six files

I've just built a dual-boot machine with Windows 10 (20H2) and Linux (Elementary OS 5.0), and it occurred to me that Reflect (7.3 Free) could probably image that drive including the ext4 partition containing Elementary OS and (I hope) the GRUB bootloader (wherever it resides). The only thing I had handy on which to write a test image was a 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive. Reflect completed the imaging but when I looked at the flash drive, I found five numbered files of 4,194.263 KB and one of 770,001 KB.

So it looks like Reflect saw removable media, assumed it was a DVD drive, and wrote multiple DVD-sized files instead of a single image file, and my questions are:

1) Can anyone confirm that Reflect WILL correctly image that dual-boot drive?

2) Is there a Reflect setting that will cause the program to write the image on the flash drive as a single file instead of as multiple files? I did look but didn't see any settings that looked promising.

CMayo said:

2) Is there a Reflect setting that will cause the program to write the image on the flash drive as a single file instead of as multiple files? I did look but didn't see any settings that looked promising.

Welcome to Ten Forums CMayo.

A Fat32 partition is limited to a maximum file size of 4GB so you'd have to format the flash drive as NTFS or ExFat in order to save a larger file to it.

By default Reflect automatically chooses the file size to suit the destination drive's format, so for Fat32 you get multiple 4GB files. This is normal, and Reflect can restore from this set of files as easily as it can from a single file.

CMayo said:

1) Can anyone confirm that Reflect WILL correctly image that dual-boot drive?

Yes, for one of my machines I have a Fat32 USB that I use for its image and that has multiple 4GB image files. I have successfully restored from it quite a few times.

Ideally you'd put the image on an external usb HDD, but as this is my 'holiday takeaway' notebook I also make a USB image. Keeping the usb as Fat32 means I can also put the recovery media boot files on it, so it means I need to take just the one usb with me to do a full restore 'in the field'.

Very helpful, all - thanks much for the help. I think becoming more aware of the FAT32 filesize limit will help me make better use of my removable media going forward. The jury's still out on whether the Macrium image will correctly capture everything necessary to restore my dual-boot system, but I'll update the thread if my testing provides a conclusive answer.

CMayo said:

..The jury's still out on whether the Macrium image will correctly capture everything necessary to restore my dual-boot system, but I'll update the thread if my testing provides a conclusive answer.

As long as you include all the partitions used by both systems in your backup image then it should.

Bree said:

As long as you include all the partitions used by both systems in your backup image then it should.

After a few false starts due to unexpected hardware issues, I can confirm that Macrium Reflect did correctly image my dual-boot system, and the image is fully functional when restored back to the drive.

Thanks for reporting back. Few are prepared to take that extra testing step of performing a restore for real (particularly if it's their only machine). Well done for thoroughly testing this.

I may have spoken too soon. I can't explain my earlier success with the Macrium image, but I needed to restore the dual-boot Macrium image yesterday and for the life of me, I could not get the computer to boot up after the restoration. After trying multiple dual-boot images and getting the same result, it occurred to me that a missing/corrupt GRUB bootloader was the likely culprit since the PC was hanging at the point GRUBwould usually appear. There are multiple ways to repair/restore GRUB but I opted for 'Boot-Repair' (‘Boot Repair’ for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and elementary OS can fix Bootloader issues | FOSS Linux), which solved the issue for me.

Boot-repair is also available at SourceForge (boot-repair / Home / Home). I think UBCD has some GRUB utilities that may also get it done, or GRUB can be reached via a LIVE CD CLI for those who like to walk on the wild side.