New
#11
So Macrium will make an exact copy of a PC's hard-drive, it just won't be bootable, right?
However, if you "cloned" to an external-drive and then installed it as the primary, internal drive, then it would boot right?
And once you booted to your clone, it would look just like the drive you cloned, including all OS and data files, right?
Correct. You can't boot Windows from external drive without some playing around. MacOS will boot from any connected drive as you know. In Windows it can be done using a separate bootloder (I use rEFInd to boot Windows) but by default, no, it will not boot.
Yes, absolutely. The disk is identical.
Yes. Again - the disk is identical.
The only difference (I use a Mac too) is that Windows doesn't boot from external drives. So you have to physically put the drive inside or restore the image from your external drive to internal.
You can make Windows boot external drives but this is another story and too long winded to go into at this point.
Yes when you use Macrium to CLONE your drive it makes a Exact copy, which IS bootable, I've done it a few times already when upgrading my SSD's The Drive has to be IN your computer thou to boot back into Windows. Old drive Removed.
Purpose of the recovery disk is to do things like a complete image restore of your C: Drive which you can only do from a bootable usb or dvd drive. dvd's are almost a thing of the past thou. I am only talking about Windows OS here. I've only run Windows OS. Never had any interest in Mac's ....never will. You can't restore your Windows OS if your ON it at the time. Have to be offline, meaning from a usb drive. Hope this explains it a little better for you. Lots of us make complete image backups just incase of a Windows problem where it can not be repaired. So in that case IF you've made a image backup of your Windows OS you can restore Windows to when it was running without any issues. I make complete image backups about once a week to maybe 10 days. Only takes me about 5 mins for a complete backup of my Windows OS .....but my rig is kinda fast. Each person does their backups on whatever time line they feel comfortable with, users choice. Also depends of size of your Windows OS too of course.
Although you are correct, I think you misunderstand.
You can boot a Mac from anything connected.
I can simply copy all directories from root (C:\ in Windows terms) to an external USB drive and boot that.
Windows you can't - it will not boot from USB - I'm talking about full Windows not some PE environment.
With Windows you need to make the disk internal (so the Windows Loader will see it) or use a different loader that will find it.
Another Mac user has come to lurk around "the dark side", huh?
So, on a PC, if you had to use a cloned drive (e.g. maybe your internal drive failed), then you would install the cloned drive into your PC, boot up, and be good to go. But then what would you do next? Clone the clone to an external drive so you have a copy?
Also, would there be any other scenarios, where I as a Mac user, might need to change my normal workflow? Like do you do things different than on a Mac if you just had to restore files or access a "backup" versus a clone?
Ever since I learned about CCC, I just skip "backups" and clone everything. That way at any given time, I can "plug and boot" and be good to go - or at least up until my last clone!
Thanks.
I'm honestly not sure if you are taking the piss. Let us assume not.
No. If either my PC or Mac had a drive failure I would buy a new disk and then restore the last backup I had from my backup image.
If you make an image or a clone of a disk you can always restore individual files on either platform. It doesn't matter what software or hardware you use - you always can.
I'm not sure I'd use the term "idiot-proof" for any software.
Macrium has both cloning and imaging capabilities.
Cloning gives you a ready to use replication of an existing drive. Bootable if the source drive is bootable. Cloning is normally used when all is well and you just need to move to a new, usually larger, hard drive.
Macrium imaging just creates an MRIMG extension image file that is a representation of at least one partition on a drive and is usually thought of as a disaster recovery method to be used at some later date when all is NOT well. That file may or may not contain Windows or data, depending on the partitions chosen during the image file creation process. The image file can be browsed for individual files before restoration, but it's only the restoration process that would make some other drive bootable, assuming the partitions necessary to run Windows were included in the image file.
Cloning and imaging have some overlapping purposes. Either can fail or work well. Imaging is probably more commonly used here, as a disaster recovery method.
No it is not. Windows will not boot from an external drive. MacOS will. That was the problem the OP had.
Please read the posts above and do remember that "bootable" is not a flag that exists any more. It is an old legacy BIOS thing.
EFI doesn't care about that - only whether there is a filesystem the firmware identify (must be FAT) and then a filesystem the bootloader can read with the drivers it has loaded (NTFS, HFS, EXT, etc)
If you want to boot Windows from external device you must either use your own loader or fiddle with the Windows one. Neither are convenient and neither is automatic.