Macrium Reflect Free adds a second Recovery partition when I restore

Hello,

I am using Macrium Relect Free to make backups of my computer.

I used it to make a system image backup of Windows 10 on an SSD. To test I booted into the Macrium Rescue media USB key and restored the image to a different HDD. Macrium added another Recovery partition to the end of the HDD. Is it supposed to do that?

I have two disks in my laptop.. Disk 0 is the SSD and Disk 1 is the HDD. I made an image backup of the SSD and restored it to the HDD. Here is a screenshot to illustrate. Why did Macrium add another Recovery partition to the end of Disk 1? Is that just standard practice? Is it better to have it at the end? Can I move or delete it? Which one should I keep?



Cheers,

Flex

@dalchina
Thanks for your advice.

I've got Windows 10 on both disks. I ran your command reagentc /info when booted into both disk and each time it told me that Partition 3 was the "Windows RE location". In the screenshot above partition 3 is the third one in from the left in both disk 0 and disk 1.

I booted into Live Ubuntu USB then mounted the 3rd Partition of each disk then did an # ls -Rl to get a list of the time stamps of all the files in each recovery partition as you suggested. The recovery partition (3rd partition) on each disk contains the same files but the timestamps are not identical and I don't know why.

Here is the contents of the HDD (Partition 3 of Disk 1) from my screenshot above:

Code:

.:
total 0
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Apr  9 17:34 HDD-sdb4.txt
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 24 05:16 Recovery
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 18 01:17 System Volume Information

./Recovery:
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 23 21:25 Logs
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 18 08:46 WindowsRE

./Recovery/Logs:
total 4
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1363 Mar 24 05:16 Reload.xml

./Recovery/WindowsRE:
total 410292
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   3170304 Dec  7  2019 boot.sdi
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root      1118 Mar 18 08:46 ReAgent.xml
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 416960919 Nov 19 02:38 Winre.wim

./System Volume Information:
total 20
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 Mar 18 01:02 SPP
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20480 Feb 15 22:52 tracking.log

./System Volume Information/SPP:
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 19 20:06 OnlineMetadataCache

./System Volume Information/SPP/OnlineMetadataCache:
total 0

Here is the contents of the SSD (Partition 3 of Disk 0) from my screenshot above:

Code:

.:
total 4
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Apr  9 17:34 HDD-sda3.txt
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Mar 24 05:16 Recovery
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4096 Mar 20 13:47 System Volume Information

./Recovery:
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 23 21:34 Logs
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 24 05:16 WindowsRE

./Recovery/Logs:
total 4
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1363 Mar 24 05:16 Reload.xml

./Recovery/WindowsRE:
total 410292
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root   3170304 Dec  7  2019 boot.sdi
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root      1117 Mar 24 05:16 ReAgent.xml
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 416960919 Nov 19 02:38 Winre.wim

./System Volume Information:
total 20
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 Mar 20 13:38 SPP
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20480 Feb 15 22:52 tracking.log

./System Volume Information/SPP:
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Mar 22 19:58 OnlineMetadataCache

./System Volume Information/SPP/OnlineMetadataCache:
total 0

Yes I am sure that the second Recovery Partition did NOT already exist on the SSD (disk 0) before I used Macrium to make a backup image of it and then restore that image to the HDD (disk 1).

Here is a screenshot of gparted of the SSD (disk 0): I made the backup from this disk. There is no extra recovery partition at the end.


Here is a screenshot of gparted of the HDD (disk 1): This is what the restored backup looks like.


It seems to me that in my version of Macrium Reflect Free, Macrium adds a recovery partition at the end of the disk when restoring a backup image. I don't remember it asking me if I wanted this and I would like to know how to stop this from happening.

Cheers,

Flex

I am using Macrium Relect Free to make backups of my computer.

I used it to make a system image backup of Windows 10 on an SSD.

Does macrium have a way of showing you what volumes are in the image?

Hi SIW2.

Is this what you mean?


Disk 1 is the SSD I made the system image backup from. I asked it to include partitions 1,2 and 3. I loaded up the backup image from where it is stored then clicked "Browse Image" and you can see the contents in that screenshot. Just three partitions. When I restore that image to a 1TB drive there is a lot of unallocated space after the recovery drive.

This is a screen shot from another partition tool called Disk Genius just to show again the partition layout of the 1TB SSD from which I made the backup image copying partitions 1,2 and 3 only.


For some reason Macrium seems to put another recovery drive at the end of the disk when it restores the backup image to another disk. Here is another screenshot from Disk Genius showing the partition layout of the 1TB HDD that I restored the backup image to... with extra recovery drive partition at the very end of the disk.


I guess I'm just asking "Is this standard behavior from Macrium" or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

Flex

It seems the extra volume was not created when making the image, yet was somehow created when restoring it to a blank disk.

Haven't seen that before, maybe it is a new feature.

@topgundcp

I took your advice, did a second restore from the image backup, and can confirm Macrium doesn't add an extra recovery partition. I didn't do that step (delete existing partitions) on the destination disk the first time I restored a backup image and so there was a recovery partition already on the destination disk before the restore happened.

I was thinking that Macrium might have placed a recovery partition on the destination disk to facilitate booting into a recovery environment if ever needed in the future. I notice from this video that Macrium have a modified Windows Recovery environment to include an option to select Macrium Rescue tools instead of needing to boot into those tools from a USB key.

@dalchina
Here are partitions of the two disks viewed in gparted... some differences in file size I supposed is not unexpected. I'm not sure which of the SDD and HDD are /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, I forgot to look at the gparted properties for each disk, but as you can see they both have identical partition layout now.

/dev/sda


And /dev/sdb


Thank you all!