What Is Macrium Reflect Used For

[Claribel Szwaja]

Yepthat's quite normal. You can disable it if you wish via Services.msc as it's a service. You can even uninstall Macrium if you want, as it doesn't have to be installed to restore your hard drive image if you're doing so from the free boot CD that Macrium offers. That's what I did, I created a one time image backup of my system to an external hard drive, created the boot CD, then uninstalled Macrium Reflect. I've since used the boot CD to restore my system twice and had absolutely no problems .

Hi ! I create a back up image at least once a month with Macrium Reflect. The reason I do that is because I want to have all the updates of my Apps. I have a external USB and I keep at least 5 images on it. I have restored a image on several occasions, and it has worked flawlessly. Its not fun to have to install up dates, so I make a image every month or when I make major changes. I recommend the free version. Make sure you have a clean PC before creating your image and your worries are over. Just restore your image, and your back just like the day you created the image. No Viruses or Malware. It's better than A virtual machine in my opinion. I wouldn't be without Macrium. Stop worrying about reformatting, and all the hassle, just restore your OS to the day when every thing worked well. It's a must for XP users.

My plan was to extend the C partition after I made the clone in disk management. After some wrangling I realized disk management will not allow me to increase the size on my C drive. The image is an exact copy with no provision to add the extra space on my 1TB drive to the C partition.

After investigating some more it appears that when using Macrium before you go to step 4 in the clone process, there is provision to add the rest of the space to C, THEN you commit to the image. What this means is I will need to start all over and erase that clone to increase the size of that partition DURING the process right after step 3.

As a side note- I noticed my license usb thumb drive stopped scanning and was flagged after I made the clone. Everything else boorted and worked normally. I suspect Waves and ilock might be I.D.ing my hard drive. Since it sees a different SSD it's a no go. How do I get around that if true?

I've used Macrium Reflect free to do what you're saying a number of times. No problems. I don't remember the details, but I thought I cloned the disk, installed it and then used disk management to enlarge the partition. I could be wrong, it's been a while. My DAW is around eight years old now, I started with a 256 gb system SDD, switched to a 512 gb, and eventually a 1 tb.

I finally managed to get it to work using Macrium Reflect. The free version of Macrium Reflect allows for enlargement of C partition when cloning as you stated. It's a little tricky for the first time user because you need to right click on the C partition to change partition size after dragging it to the clone drive and BEFORE you drag any more partitions on to it. After ordering some additional cabling, I should be able to now use my old 500gb drive as another storage drive and image all of my drives onto a larger external drive.

Thanks Kevin, I attempted this with the last clone I made ( the smaller partition) it seemed as if it should work but didn't. I remember reading something about the succession of partitions being important. IOW if you had a partition after the C partition, this somehow prevented enlarging the middle one.

I'm not sure why my boot drive has three partitions, a smaller 500mb at the beginning, the larger C drive in the middle and another a smaller 500mbish one at the end. I replaced everything the same because I didn't want to take any chances on the new drive.

Today using Windows 10 I had to install a new version of Macrium Reflect using Windows Safe Mode. The previous version of Reflect used a driver mrcbt.sys that was causing a BSOD immediately after booting, and Safe Mode was needed to keep the driver from loading.

While running the Macrium installation program reflectdlfull.exe I got an error message (attached) from a 1Password executable. After verifying that the installation had not worked I stopped 1Password and tried again, and the installation ran successfully.

I'm submitting this in case it helps you track down a problem that you already know about or that you want to pursue. I hope never to use Safe Mode again and this is not a problem that I'm asking you to fix, rather I just want to point it out to you if you choose to.

Macrium Reflect (which performs drive image backups) does load a driver mrcbt.sys (macrium reflect changed block tracker) that tracks which storage blocks are changed so it doesn't have to back up everything. So that sounds like the same problem you describe.

I'm using Macrium Reflect to clone my 1GB HD with Win 10 64bit to a 480 GB SSD, which is successfully installed. When cloned and BIOS is changed to boot from the SSD, the boot partition appears to be nonfunctional. I'm using a tutorial at where a Dell is used, but am following his steps, with the exception of his BIOS changes, different on the HP. I've used DiskPart to clean the disk prior to reattempting the clone a couple of times, with no success. Has anyone attempted this upgrade on an HP laptop or notebook similar to my HP Notebook - 14-cf0013dx with success? TIA, MikeC

Yes. Going from a larger to smaller disk, in your case 1 TB to 480 gigs, the default is to shrink each partition to 48% of its previous size and may leave you with a nonfunctional system or boot partition. You have to manually move partitions other than the big C:\ drive partition at their original size and then resize the big partition to whatever is left over.

My original 1TB spiinning drive is SATA and would use legacy BIOS Windows boot. The SSD is UEFI and would boot based on that "protocol". Forgive me, if I misstate terms, I'm 12 years removed from being a SW engineer and things have definitely moved on..

When I changed the boot order to point to the cloned SSD, and booted, it still booted to the original HD (the HD spinning was audible and the boot was at the HD speed(slow)). The SSD, however, was shown as the C:drive on both Explorer and Disk Manager. On a later clone and boot try, I removed the HD and it would not boot. It appears to be using the original BIOS legacy boot sector(which of course is cloned to the new UEFI drive).

Looking at Macrium Reflects forum, I found folks having an issue cloning from UEFI to UEFI drives, where despite changing the boot order, the machine would boot to the previous UEFI boot drive. No solution was suggested, only contact MR support, who had not responded in the thread. This appears to be what is happening with my machine, only with 2 different boot "types". I suspect my next step is to contact Macrium Reflect support, unless I get a reply from this forum from someone with a similar experience.

One more piece of info on the boot mode, using msinfo32, the BIOS mode is listed as UEFI, so i'm doing a UEFI to UEFI clone, and the recent scenario description on the Macrium Reflect forum where the old boot drive is used to boot, is what I appear to be experiencing.

Yes I was going to say the hardware does not determine if the boot mode is legacy or UEFI; that is set in the preboot environment on the machine. If the machine will boot in UEFI mode using just the original spinning hard drive then in theory a perfect copy onto the SSD should be bootable.

Progress, sorta.. The PC became locked in a Blue Screen loop trying to auto repair from a Kmode not handled exception.. Ran System Diagnostics and things looked fine. Trying to run System Restore resulted in a never ending wait at the "Please Wait Here" screen. Decided to forgo the NVME drive and try the internal SATA Samsung 1TB SSD that I'd been cloning periodically for over a year. Last clone was about a week ago. Installed in place of the spinning drive and it booted flawlessly.

Looked for more info on just doing a fresh install on an M2 drive and came across this video. He claims he's had issues with NVME drives not working in HP laptops, even with a fresh Windows install He installed a M2 SATA, rather than NVME .. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udg2Qge8Fk .

I have a fresh NVME 512GB installed along with the SSD drive and will try a fresh install on the NVME to see if it will boot and function normally. I could install a SATA M2 drive, if it doesn't work, but don't think there would be much of a speed advantage over the internal SSD drive. It would allow using the internal drive for data, so still might make the change.

Never had an issue with NVME vs SATA. You are correct that a SATA M.2 offers no speed advantage over a 2.5 inch SATA SSD. Same hardware in a different package so transfer speeds the same. One thing with NVME SSDs in general. Windows 10 and 11 need a driver slipstreamed into the image of the OS in order to work on I believe 11th gen and higher Intel processors. But yours is 8th gen so that is not the issue

I mean, maybe if you use Macrium, but you must make a forensic copy and not an intelligent sector copy. But with Macrium, I've found that one, to be safe, should use the same version number that was used for backup as to restore. If not, I've seen that Windows won't boot and their own software won't fix the Windows boot problems.

But recently, I wrote back a Macrium Reflect image of my encrypted hard drive, not a forensic copy, and when I entered my Veracrypt password, it was not accepted. I tried booting off my rescue disk, and that also did not work. I tried booting off of Gandalf's rescue disk, and using veracrypt on that disk, and choosing to use the backup header, that also did not work. So I question whether the backup header in the volume actually works, or if that version of Veracrypt actually worked.

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