A Question About Macrium Reflect

cereberus said:

I never use Rufus anymore. I simply mount iso as a drive and simply copy files to a fat32 drive.

With the standard MS iso, the drive is fully legacy bios or uefi compatible. It may be necessary to mark partition as active from diskpart for legacy bios installs but that only takes a few seconds.

If you are OK with standard Windows install media, your method is OK. Simply copy the install files to FAT32 formatted USB flash drive. However, size of install.wim already closing the magical 4 GB limit (install.wim on official Insider ISO for build 17025 EN-GB is 3.84 GB), I think it's only wise to learn about alternatives. In not too distant future you might not be able to continue using FAT32 USB drive to install Windows.

I am a Rufus fan, simply because it makes it so easy to crate USB media using my custom install.wim files which are always bigger than 4 GB. For my own deployment needs, I install W10 on a reference VM, customize it in Audit Mode, install all software and so on, then capture Windows image to custom install.wim. Sometimes it's only 7 or 8 GB, sometimes 12 to 15 GB, depending on Windows version, edition and intended purpose of custom install media I am creating:

I've posted the below earlier, let's post it once more

A bit strange fact but theoretically there's absolutely no reason why UEFI computers can't be booted from NTFS. However, some (in fact most) hardware manufacturers still include this restriction to their UEFI. Rufus bypasses this artificial restriction by creating a small FAT32 partition on USB drive to boot a UEFI machine, which then gives the control to an NTFS partition containing Windows install files with your custom install.wim file.

A quote from https://github.com/pbatard/uefi-ntfs:

As an aside, and because there appears to exist a lot of innacurate information about this on the Internet, it needs to be stressed out that there is absolutely nothing in the UEFI specifications that actually forces the use of FAT32 for UEFI boot. On the contrary, UEFI will happily boot from ANY file system, as long as your firmware has a driver for it. As such, it is only the choice of system manufacturers, who tend to only include a driver for FAT32, that limits the default boot capabilities of UEFI, and that leads many to erroneously believe that only FAT32 can be used for UEFI boot.

Rufus (download: Rufus, the creator of it Akeo is our member) makes this automatically. You only need to take care of the highlighted settings, set Partition scheme to MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI-CSM, and set File System to NTFS:

This will create a USB flash drive with NTFS file system to allow you to add as big files as you want to / need to, creating a small FAT32 partition to take care of the boot phase. My own current custom install.wim is over 14 GB, I have had no issues in using that install media on devices not accepting boot from NTFS USB drive.

Kari

Kari said:

If you are OK with standard Windows install media, your method is OK. Simply copy the install files to FAT32 formatted USB flash drive. However, size of install.wim already closing the magical 4 GB limit (install.wim on official Insider ISO for build 17025 EN-GB is 3.84 GB), I think it's only wise to learn about alternatives. In not too distant future you might not be able to continue using FAT32 USB drive to install Windows.

I am a Rufus fan, simply because it makes it so easy to crate USB media using my custom install.wim files which are always bigger than 4 GB. For my own deployment needs, I install W10 on a reference VM, customize it in Audit Mode, install all software and so on, then capture Windows image to custom install.wim. Sometimes it's only 7 or 8 GB, sometimes 12 to 15 GB, depending on Windows version, edition and intended purpose of custom install media I am creating:

I've posted the below earlier, let's post it once more

A bit strange fact but theoretically there's absolutely no reason why UEFI computers can't be booted from NTFS. However, some (in fact most) hardware manufacturers still include this restriction to their UEFI. Rufus bypasses this artificial restriction by creating a small FAT32 partition on USB drive to boot a UEFI machine, which then gives the control to an NTFS partition containing Windows install files with your custom install.wim file.

A quote from https://github.com/pbatard/uefi-ntfs:



Rufus (download: Rufus, the creator of it Akeo is our member) makes this automatically. You only need to take care of the highlighted settings, set Partition scheme to MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI-CSM, and set File System to NTFS:

This will create a USB flash drive with NTFS file system to allow you to add as big files as you want to / need to, creating a small FAT32 partition to take care of the boot phase. My own current custom install.wim is over 14 GB, I have had no issues in using that install media on devices not accepting boot from NTFS USB drive.

Kari

I do not disagree but Macrium isos are tiny of course.

Sooner or later MS have to solve the issue or else the media creation tool will eventually not work for clean installs. Of course install.esd files are smaller.

I am guessing the might end up with another install.wim file e.g. install2.wim or something like that. Also, now windows can handle multiple partitions on usb drives, they could easily go down the small fat32 plus ntfs route as well using mct.

I accept it might get too complicated in time and Rufus will be simpler. I have used it a lot in past but rarely bother now.

cereberus said:

I do not disagree but Macrium isos are tiny of course.

You know me, I have a degree in off topic

Anyway, just to clarify: In no way was I criticizing simple Copy & Paste method to make a USB install media. As long as it works, it's the easiest and simplest method. I just wanted to show a practical example why Rufus is a pretty good alternative, especially when as I mentioned the install media contains a file or files that are bigger than 4 GB.

Kari said:

You know me, I have a degree in off topic

Anyway, just to clarify: In no way was I criticizing simple Copy & Paste method to make a USB install media. As long as it works, it's the easiest and simplest method. I just wanted to show a practical example why Rufus is a pretty good alternative, especially when as I mentioned the install media contains a file or files that are bigger than 4 GB.

Horses for courses.

Runnerbean said:

Why did my thread turn into something rather complicated looking including some very bad advice about formatting the Rescue Drive in NFTS??? It's all sorted now anyway and I've successfully created both my Image and Rescue media using Macrium some days ago.

With regards the USB Flash Drive for Rescue. It was already factory made as FAT32. I simply placed the USB into the socket on my PC and let Macrium do the rest by creating the Rescue tools.

I've successfully tested the Rescue USB when Booting from it via selecting it in BIOS and I got to WINPE. Once in,..I successfully navigated to where my Image was on my external Drive and it found it. I then cancelled as I obviously didn't want to actually restore, it was just a test.

That's it. Done and dusted!

Thanks to Kari for his excellent tutorial which got me through it.

To be fair, the advice was more irrelevant than bad. If you used rufus, it would sort out correct formats anyway.

As you say (and @NavyLCDR) - Macrium Reflect does it all.

By the way, I recommend you now add MRF as a boot entry from Other Tasks menu. In most cases, you will not even need to boot from a flash drive except if drive fails or is very badly corrupted or gets wiped.

Kari said:

Just plug in the USB drive, Macrium will make it bootable and copy necessary files to it.

Kari, MR7 for some reason refuses to complete a MR7/WinPE DVD on my laptop -- something seems to be wrong with WinPE loading/mounting/etc. I'm asking here because the same problem has happened before (MR6) for my USB boot.