Create a distributable backup on dissimilar hardware

myMoustache said:

How often have you failed with the paid version?
1/10, 1/100, 1/1000?
How many PCs do you prepare in 1 year?

I'm retired, so my imaging and restores are for personal use only. I have half a dozen PCs I regularly image or restore. mostly restoring to the same machine but I do also restore a machine's image to a VM (or vice versa), or from one machine to a dissimilar one. I've never yet found a need for Redeploy, Win10 is good enough at sorting out the drivers for itself.

My System Two in my specs below gets by far the most imaging/restores. Each Patch Tuesday I restore its images of the currently supported versions of W10, update them, then image them. Typically that's 2 or 3 restores a month, with the same number of images (+1 more to an external drive).

In the three years since I started using Free (then upgraded to Home a year ago) I've never seen any restore fail. That must add up to a couple of hundred restores by now. HTH.

Today I created 3 ISOs with Macrium and I have some questions.
1) Are these ticks correct?

"Prompt for key press to continue sequence" - Only needed if creating CD/DVD media

Set WIM build options



32/64 bit is dependent on the architecture used by the target machine.

iSCSI support only needed if using that protocol for data transfer over your network.

Enable Legacy SMB v 1 support only needed if working with devices that require NETbios functionality (not necessary on most devices)

2) I make a premise, I only use Windows 10 Pro 32/64, not other versions. I created 3 ISOs but I can't figure out when I have to use Windows PE and when Windows RE and which one is more powerful and above all what Windows PE and Windows RE are.
ISO 1: Windows PE 10 with 32-bit support (MacriumRescue32-WinPE-10.iso)
ISO 2: Windows PE 10 with 64-bit support (MacriumRescue64-WinPE-10.iso)
ISO 3: Windows RE with 64-bit support (MacriumRescue64-WinRE.iso)
What's inside all these MBs

WinRE is based on the Windows Recovery environment of your host (master) machine. It offers better compatibility with that machine but does not extend to client devices.
WinPE is based on Windows Pre-Installation Environment and offers the best support for dissimilar hardware.

What's inside all these MBs? Not sure about this question, if you need to understand what the difference is between them the above should provide that.

3) I use Rufus but I don't understand which ticks I have to use. I often make attempts. I would like to understand a rule.

Why use Rufus? Just use the Macrium tool to build a USB flash drive out of the ISO created. No guess work in that

In the trial version you cannot try the 'Redeploy Image to Dissimilar Hardware' feature. In my opinion this function has not been implemented because it does not work.

You know what they say about opinions. So this leaves you to test how good Windows 10 will be at locating the drivers necessary to get your newly imaged disks to boot. Might as well see what happens