I have two Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) SP1 computers: a desktop and a laptop. I have Reflex v7.3.5555 on both of them (paid version on desktop; free on laptop). My laptop is set to back up Reflex images to a 4 TB hard drive installed on my desktop. I have never had any problems backing up to this hard drive from my laptop. It has been years since I did a restore from my laptop, but I never had a problem doing so that I can remember. (See also note on XP computer, below).

Today I tried to do a full image restore for a backup file created Oct. 18, 2020. I get this message shortly after I click on Restore Image->Next->Finish:
Demounting Drives; Demount failed; Checking and Building PE Rescue Media. Then I get the pop-up error message shown in the included image. I tried to do the restore several times. I rebooted my laptop. I checked to make sure that the address on my F drive was correct, and that it contained the backup file in question.

I did a search for 'unable to lock drive' on the Macrium site, and found nothing. I could not find anything to tell me what Windows PE is. I checked under Reflect defaults->Advanced on my laptop, and found that Macrium Reflect PE files is checked for C: drive, but not for Q; drive (my laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad, and II think that is where Lenovo stores advanced features ).

I did find about 2 years ago I has a similar problem on my old XP computer. The error message images from that time show that I clicked on 'Run from Windows PE' and got a Windows Security pop-up asking for network login credentials. I have no record of my next step, if any.

So can someone give me some guidance here? Why am I now getting this message, and what do I hvae to do to Restore this backed up image file?


Harry

I'd recommend doing so from USB rescue media, that side-steps issues about in-use drives, I'm never comfortable running a restore from within Windows or from the boot menu option, if anything should happen (like a power outage) partway through, you end up with a system you can't boot & the start menu item gone.

I agree that booting into the Rescue environment first and then setting up the restore is likely to avoid this issue, and it's my preferred method as well.  In addition to the risk that Beardy called out, I just think that if the restore is going to be performed in Rescue anyway, you may as well set it up in Rescue to begin with.

+x

 

jphughan - 10 February 2021 12:01 AM

I agree that booting into the Rescue environment first and then setting up the restore is likely to avoid this issue, and it's my preferred method as well.  In addition to the risk that Beardy called out, I just think that if the restore is going to be performed in Rescue anyway, you may as well set it up in Rescue to begin with.

Thanks guys for the help. Remember you are dealing with a slow learner here.

I took a new 16GB USB 3 drive, followed the Macrium Rescue Media Builder  instructions, and created a Rescue media on it.I chose Windows RE.
Then I noticed down below the Advanced Options section, was a note that says "For Windows 7 systems with 3.0 ports it may be necessary to use PE 5.0 or PE 10.0 to enable USB 3.0 in the rescue media".

Two questions:
1. Should I start again and use one of the PE options?
2. No matter your answer to #1, now that I have it what are my next steps? Do I assume that I copy the Image files that I have on my 4TB hard drive to the USB stick, and then choose the Restore Image option from the backup I am trying to restore?


Harry

Yes, I would recommend using WinPE 10 instead.  Sorry, I missed that you were still on Windows 7.

In terms of how to proceed, you do not have to copy the Reflect backup onto your flash drive, and in many cases they wouldn't fit anyway.  Your USB drive will be available in the Rescue environment, so you can just work with the images that way.  You'll just need to know how to boot your system from a USB flash drive.  That process varies a bit from PC to PC, but typically there's a key you can press during initial startup that will cause a one-time boot menu to appear, and from there you'll select your USB flash drive.  That's much easier than rearranging options in the BIOS boot order.  Make sure the USB flash drive is connected from initial system startup, and sometimes it can help to connect it directly to a USB port on the system (i.e. not through a hub) and disconnect any other storage devices.  If you have to do the latter, then you can reconnect the external hard drive containing your images when Reflect Rescue boots.

+x

 

jphughan - 10 February 2021 2:12 AM

Yes, I would recommend using WinPE 10 instead.  Sorry, I missed that you were still on Windows 7.

In terms of how to proceed, you do not have to copy the Reflect backup onto your flash drive, and in many cases they wouldn't fit anyway.  Your USB drive will be available in the Rescue environment, so you can just work with the images that way.  You'll just need to know how to boot your system from a USB flash drive.  That process varies a bit from PC to PC, but typically there's a key you can press during initial startup that will cause a one-time boot menu to appear, and from there you'll select your USB flash drive.  That's much easier than rearranging options in the BIOS boot order.  Make sure the USB flash drive is connected from initial system startup, and sometimes it can help to connect it directly to a USB port on the system (i.e. not through a hub) and disconnect any other storage devices.  If you have to do the latter, then you can reconnect the external hard drive containing your images when Reflect Rescue boots.

I currently have both computers set up to boot from a CD if they won't boot on their own. On my computers, F8 is the key that is pressed to get to where there is an option to boot from the CD.

Now you have me REALLY confused on the USB drive, though. I thought it was created so that I could do the image restore without getting the 'unable to lock drive' message. But now that I checked you are correct that it does not have the capacity to hold one full image backup.  So then how do I restore the past image?


Harry

Think of the Rescue environment as its own miniature operating system -- since that's precisely what it is.  And as a result, booting from a USB flash drive does NOT mean that you'll be limited to accessing the contents of the flash drive -- or the CD if you have made a Rescue Media CD, which obviously wouldn't be able to hold much of any type of backup.  Instead, once Rescue loads, you will have an operating system running, which means you will be able to work with your other USB devices, including your keyboard, mouse, and....any attached external hard drive.  So you'll just go to the Restore tab and perform a restore following the exact same wizard that you've been trying to use within Windows.  You'll be able to access the same backups in Rescue that you were able to access in full Windows.

jphughan:

Thanks for your post. That helped clarify the process for me.

Here is what I did:

I followed your recommendations and installed Rescue Media Windows PE10 on my USB flash drive. Then I shut down Windows, and rebooted it from the USB drive. The attached screen shot shows what I got. Although I can drill down from the various entries, and the location of the backups on my desktop computer are correct, it will not recognize the .mrimg number of any of my files.

So I shut down Windows, installed the CD rescue disk that I created last year, and rebooted. The resulting screen looked normal.

Then I again shut down Windows, installed Windows PE 3.1 on my USB drive, and rebooted. This works fine.

Then I chose Restore Image. It took 4 hours to restore and auto verify it! This is a full restore, the file is ~140,000 KB, and it is stored on my desktop computer, so the information has to travel over my network to get to the laptop. But to do a full backup and auto verify of these images only takes about 1 hour, 25 minutes. Why the great difference in time?

The resulting restored image looks fine. I have been using the computer for about 1.5 days, and running the web browser program that created the initial problem without any issues. As the old saying goes: "All's well that ends well."

But I have several questions about this whole episode:
1. Does the choice of Rescue Media (PE 10, PE 3.1, CD, etc.) have any effect on the time it takes to restore the image?
2. Will I have to go through this Rescue Media process every time I want to Restore an image, or was this a problem with the Macrium installation on my laptop? What if it is a File & Folder backup?
3. Will I have to go through this Rescue Media process every time I want to Backup an image? I don't ever remember having to do it in the past.
4. I assume that the Rescue Media on a USB drive is the only option because CD drives are no longer supplied with new Windows computers? As I noted, my CD boot disk seemed to function fine.

Again, thanks for your help and patience.


Harry

If you're not seeing your backups in the Restore tab, click the "Folders to search" link and add the location(s) containing your backups.  When you build Rescue Media, Reflect copies the "Folders to search" list from the desktop application into the Rescue Media environment, but that doesn't always result in the desired outcome.  Drive letters are not always assigned the same way in Rescue as they are in full Windows.  Normally there's no connection whatsoever since they're completely different OS environments and partitions themselves don't have any tag on them saying, "I should be assigned drive letter X."  Reflect embeds some information to try to ensure drive letter consistency, but there are situations where that doesn't work -- especially encrypted partitions that are unlocked after Reflect loads.  Similarly with network paths, Reflect embeds stored network share credential info, but I don't know how reliable that is since I don't need that particular feature based on my setups.  But since you mentioned a difference between WinPE 3.1 and WinPE 10, if you have an ancient NAS that only supports SMBv1, that was disabled by default starting with some release of Windows 10 and its corresponding WinPE 10.  I can't remember which.  SMBv1 is extremely old, slow and insecure (even its much better replacement SMBv2 is over a decade old now having been introduced with Windows Vista), so hopefully your NAS supports something better, possibly after a firmware update, but if not then when you build Rescue Media with WinPE 10, you may have to go into the Advanced options and choose to enable SMBv1 support.  That setting will stick for subsequent WinPE 10 builds.

Not sure exactly what's going on with the time to restore vs. perform a backup.  There are several possible factors there, and narrowing them down would involve running some tests.  For example, I'd be curious how long just verifying a given Full backup takes within full Windows vs. in Rescue, just to isolate that one variable.  You can verify a backup at any time by selecting it in the Restore tab and clicking Verify Image.

As to your questions at the end:

1. I don't think WinPE/RE would have a real effect on performance.  It's possible that one build might have slightly different drivers for the same hardware that might result in performance differences, but I wouldn't expect anything on the order of what you observed.  Prior to Reflect 7.2, Reflect kept the default WinPE/RE power profile of "Balanced" rather than "High Performance", which could significantly increase the time to perform backups and restores, but Macrium explicitly set High Performance starting with Reflect 7.2, and to my knowledge that does not vary based on WinPE/RE version.
2. You shouldn't have to go through the Rescue Media process every time -- although you should always make sure you have Rescue Media.  One "split the difference" option would be to manually boot your PC into the boot menu recovery environment.  That's what Reflect sets up to occur automatically if you stage a restore of your Windows disk within Windows, but you can just choose to boot into that on your own.  It's the same environment, but you boot from files located on your disk, without the need to boot from an external flash drive or disc.  But again, those files won't always be there in all disaster scenarios, so treat that as a convenience rather than your sole Rescue environment.  File & Folder backups can be performed within Windows because they don't require taking entire partitions offline, but you shouldn't back up the entire C drive as a File & Folder backup.  Individual folders containing your personal data are fine, but certain folders within the Windows folder for example use file system techniques that won't be captured or restored properly with an F&F backup.
   
3. You shouldn't have to use Rescue to perform backups.  You CAN do that, and that can be useful if for example your system suddenly became unbootable and you hadn't captured a backup recently.  That way you can at least grab the latest version of all of your data before you restore a working image, and then later on extract individual files and folders that you need from the pre-restore backup.
4. USB flash drives aren't the only option.  Reflect still supports burning discs if your system does.
   

Thanks for your prompt reply.
You said; "If you're not seeing your backups in the Restore tab, click the "Folders to search" link and add the location(s) containing your backups."

Perhaps I mislead you. My backup do appear when I click on the Restore tab and the list of locations are correct in 'Folders to search'. The image I sent occurred ONLY when I tried the PE10 option. And even then, went I clicked on the 'Folders to search'  option, the list of locations were correct. But entering the image file in 'Browse for an image file' did nothing. But dropping back to PE3.1 created the correct screen.

"if not then when you build Rescue Media with WinPE 10, you may have to go into the Advanced options and choose to enable SMBv1 support. That setting will stick for subsequent WinPE 10 builds."

Thanks for that tip. I'll try that when I have some time to experiment on that, as well as some of the other ideas you mentioned. Then I will provide more feedback.

Harry