Acronis True Image Alternatives

topgundcp said:

Yep. Another way to boot it, is to create a partition on an internal/external HD, format as FAT32, copy the content of the ISO and mark it as Active then you don't need a USB/DVD.

I have just tried to do this, created a partition, formatted it as fat32, mounted iso as a drive and enabled all hidden files to be seen, and copied everything to the partition.

I went to disk management. and right clicked on partition, but option to make it active was greyed out.

How do you make it active (note: my pc is an eufi install if that is relevant).

Once it is active, how do I boot it - presumably adding some kind of boot entry making PC dual boot?

@cereberus
For MBR disk. Use diskpart to mark it active. To boot it, access the boot menu and select from the boot menu or if your PC does not have boot menu then you would have to set the boot priority in the BIOS for it. Exactly the same way as if you boot from USB/DVD.

In addition. If the disk you use is GPT then there's no such thing as "Active" in GPT disk. You would have to format the partition as NTFS, copy the files and from boot menu, select the disk with UEFI prefix to boot from.

NOTE: This procedure will work with both KYHI's Recovery WinPE and Macrium Rescue disk.
For KYHI's Recovery, you'd need to have a larger partition size since it is over 1MB.

Hope this clears up the confusion.

@DeaconFrost - looks like you opened up a can of Macrium here. Any thoughts/questions on the suggestions so far?

Image for Windows/Linux/DOS (Terabyte Unlimited) is also worth checking out, especially in terms of reliability, although a bit technical for somes' tastes and, IIRC, not much on free options.

I have just tried to do this, created a partition, formatted it as fat32, mounted iso as a drive and enabled all hidden files to be seen, and copied everything to the partition.

I have My PE setup as a bootable partition - rather then a bootable disk..
And keep it also on a bootable USB...

You need to add a New BCD Entry to make the Partition Bootable via Boot Manager

@topgundcp
Can I test or can you link me to your ExamDiff script..

topgundcp said:

@cereberus
For MBR disk. Use diskpart to mark it active. To boot it, access the boot menu and select from the boot menu or if your PC does not have boot menu then you would have to set the boot priority in the BIOS for it. Exactly the same way as if you boot from USB/DVD.




In addition. If the disk you use is GPT then there's no such thing as "Active" in GPT disk. You would have to format the partition as NTFS, copy the files and from boot menu, select the disk with UEFI prefix to boot from.

NOTE: This procedure will work with both KYHI's Recovery WinPE and Macrium Rescue disk.
For KYHI's Recovery, you'd need to have a larger partition size since it is over 1MB.

Hope this clears up the confusion.

Holy crap - I had put the partition on same drive as my OS, and turned off pc to carry on today.

When I turned on PC, it booted straight to the Recovery WinPE drive even though I had not changed any boot sectors etc.

My bios is pretty crap with very few options ie set pc to eufi or legacy, or change boot order with no option to select individual hard drives (have to choose via msconfig).

I ran macrium and went to fix boot problems, and it saw the windows 10, rebuilt boot sectors, and I rebooted.

WTF - still booted to Recovery drive!

I could not find anyway to boot to windows (as a last resort I even deleted partition and used Macrium again - still failed).

Just used Macrium to restore pc from an image backup - good old Macrium!

I shall stick to Rescue disk being on a usb stick!