About Macrium Reflect (Rescue Disk)

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but, If you Format a drive
as NTFS or exFat, and then select it as target for your Rescue Disk,
then you will be told that your destination disk needs Formatting.
Thus you agree to above and it create a smallish (1GB)partition called
'Macrium PE, which should be bootable.

The rest of the space on your destination drive is blank (unused) and
needs to be Created&Formatted using 'Disk Manager'.

Thus you can use Bulk of space on the Drive for say, Backup-Up file.

Patrick <Patrick@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> About Macrium Reflect (Rescue Disk)
>
> I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but, If you Format a
> drive as NTFS or exFat, and then select it as target for your Rescue
> Disk, then you will be told that your destination disk needs
> Formatting. Thus you agree to above and it create a smallish
> (1GB)partition called 'Macrium PE, which should be bootable.
>
> The rest of the space on your destination drive is blank (unused) and
> needs to be Created&Formatted using 'Disk Manager'.
>
> Thus you can use Bulk of space on the Drive for say, Backup-Up file.

Using up a partition would be a waste. You can save the PE+Macium image
to bootable media (CD, DVD, USB). You can also add a boot image to list
on bootup. This is an image file (.dat) that is read as a volume. This
is similar to loading .vhd files as virtual machines.

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Adding+a+boot+menu+option+for+Reflect+recovery

I see no reason to waste a partition to hold a boot image when an image
file on an existing partition works the same way. When the boot image
is added to the boot menu, you get a choice of which image to load when
Windows starts: the Windows partition, or the image file (.dat or .wim).

After using the "Add recovery boot menu option" in Macrium Reflect, run
"bcdedit" (no arguments) in an elevated command shell. One entry will
be the .wim file for the PE+Macrium boot image.

Multibooting can use multiple partitions, one for each OS to select
which to use as the active partition from which to load an OS. Or, you
can use an existing partition, and specify an image of a partition to
load an OS.

The size of the partition solely used to hold an OS (Windows PE) may not
be 1GB. It will depend on cluster size. The .wim file is 569,971,770
in size (for my setup), and may have 1 cluster extra for slack space.
When I look at the properties of the .wim file using File Explorer,
sizes are:

Size: 569,971,770
Size on disk: 569,974,784

So, the slack space of 3,014 byes is less than 1 cluster of 4096 bytes
(the file has extended just a bit into the last cluster). That's still
a big different from the 1GB partition, if that's truly the smallest
partition size you can create. That specific-use partition could be a
lot larger.

On 12/25/2021 5:42 PM, Patrick wrote:
> About Macrium Reflect (Rescue Disk)
>
> I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but, If you Format a drive as NTFS or exFat, and then select it as target for your Rescue Disk, then you will be told that your destination disk needs Formatting.
> Thus you agree to above and it create a smallish (1GB)partition called 'Macrium PE, which should be bootable.
>
> The rest of the space on your destination drive is blank (unused) and needs to be Created&Formatted using 'Disk Manager'.
>
> Thus you can use Bulk of space on the Drive for say, Backup-Up file.

The problem with that, is older Windows will not mount more than
the first partition on the stick.

Your idea is perfect for Linux, where the USB drives have consistently
mounted all the partitions on them, and not just the first one.

Windows 10 was supposed to gain multi-partition automounter behavior
on some recent release, but I can't honestly say I detected a
clean delineation, where one OS version would not do it properly,
and the next one did.

So while you can create that partition if you want, it's not always
going to be visible, and may cause handling problems as you move
around your computer room. For example, you could give the stick
to a friend, the friend could be stuck at 19041 due to some
Windows Update problem, and then the stick doesn't fully mount.
Only the first partition mounts.

The policy might also depend on RMB=0 or RMB=1. That's the Removable
Media status byte. USB sticks used to arrive consistently with just
one value for that, but now, sticks are made with either value.
A Sony stick might appear as a "Fixed Disk" in Windows, and it has
something to do with RMB value.

This stuff just isn't complicated enough.

Paul

On 26/12/2021 02:06, VanguardLH wrote:
> Patrick <Patrick@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> About Macrium Reflect (Rescue Disk)
>>
>> I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but, If you Format a
>> drive as NTFS or exFat, and then select it as target for your Rescue
>> Disk, then you will be told that your destination disk needs
>> Formatting. Thus you agree to above and it create a smallish
>> (1GB)partition called 'Macrium PE, which should be bootable.
>>
>> The rest of the space on your destination drive is blank (unused) and
>> needs to be Created&Formatted using 'Disk Manager'.
>>
>> Thus you can use Bulk of space on the Drive for say, Backup-Up file.
>
> Using up a partition would be a waste. You can save the PE+Macium image
> to bootable media (CD, DVD, USB).

My message should have pointed out that it works on a USB
(External-Hard-drive, Thumb-drive etc.

> You can also add a boot image to list
> on bootup. This is an image file (.dat) that is read as a volume. This
> is similar to loading .vhd files as virtual machines.
>
> https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Adding+a+boot+menu+option+for+Reflect+recovery
>
> I see no reason to waste a partition to hold a boot image when an image
> file on an existing partition works the same way. When the boot image
> is added to the boot menu, you get a choice of which image to load when
> Windows starts: the Windows partition, or the image file (.dat or .wim).
>
> After using the "Add recovery boot menu option" in Macrium Reflect, run
> "bcdedit" (no arguments) in an elevated command shell. One entry will
> be the .wim file for the PE+Macrium boot image.
>
> Multibooting can use multiple partitions, one for each OS to select
> which to use as the active partition from which to load an OS. Or, you
> can use an existing partition, and specify an image of a partition to
> load an OS.
>
> The size of the partition solely used to hold an OS (Windows PE) may not
> be 1GB. It will depend on cluster size. The .wim file is 569,971,770
> in size (for my setup), and may have 1 cluster extra for slack space.
> When I look at the properties of the .wim file using File Explorer,
> sizes are:
>
> Size: 569,971,770
> Size on disk: 569,974,784
>
> So, the slack space of 3,014 byes is less than 1 cluster of 4096 bytes
> (the file has extended just a bit into the last cluster). That's still
> a big different from the 1GB partition, if that's truly the smallest
> partition size you can create. That specific-use partition could be a
> lot larger.

On 26/12/2021 02:06, VanguardLH wrote:
> The size of the partition solely used to hold an OS (Windows PE) may not
> be 1GB. It will depend on cluster size. The .wim file is 569,971,770
> in size (for my setup), and may have 1 cluster extra for slack space.
> When I look at the properties of the .wim file using File Explorer,
> sizes are:
>
> Size: 569,971,770
> Size on disk: 569,974,784
1GB is what MR did on a 32GB thumbdrive, also it is to be noted that
said partition by MR is FAT32.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9nnpmvlfsrp5del/Screenshot%202021-12-26%2005.20.11.png?dl=0

Patrick <Patrick@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> VanguardLH wrote:
>
>> The size of the partition solely used to hold an OS (Windows PE) may
>> not be 1GB. It will depend on cluster size. The .wim file is
>> 569,971,770 in size (for my setup), and may have 1 cluster extra for
>> slack space. When I look at the properties of the .wim file using
>> File Explorer, sizes are:
>>
>> Size: 569,971,770
>> Size on disk: 569,974,784
>
> 1GB is what MR did on a 32GB thumbdrive, also it is to be noted that
> said partition by MR is FAT32.
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/9nnpmvlfsrp5del/Screenshot%202021-12-26%2005.20.11.png?dl=0

MR made the boot partition too big. You could use a 3rd party partition
manager to reduce the size of the boot partition, and add the freed
space to the other partition(s). I've used Easeus Partition Master
(needs to get installed), but there many similar tools (e.g., Minitool
Partition Wizard which has a non-installed portable version, GParted,
AOMEI Partition Assistance, Paragon Partition Manager, etc).

However, for what else are you going to use that USB flash drive? Seems
it will get used just as MR rescue media. If so, you could use a much
smaller USB flash drive. Perhaps 32GB is the smallest one you have.
The smallest I have in storage is 16GB. I had some smaller ones, but
got rid of them over time (too slow, too small). Seems a waste to
discard all the 31GB partition that'll never get used, but even 16GB USB
flash drives are very cheap nowadays (under $5). I wouldn't want to use
the MR Rescue USB flash drive for anything else. Flash drives are
self-destruct, so they will eventually catastrophically fail, and I
don't want something for critical for emergency restores to get used for
anything else. Since an emergency flash drive wouldn't be used for
anything else, I don't see why not to use 1 partition for the full 32GB
of your USB flash drive. Simpler to manage the partitions (you'd just
have one), and LOTS of room for larger Windows PE images with larger MR
apps inserted. You could insert more into a Windows PE image than just
MR to afford you more tools in that bootable image.