I have Macrium v8.06979, Windows 10 Home, Dell XPS 17.

I'm about to create a bootable USB flash drive. I only intend to use this USB drive on this Dell laptop.

I have two questions:

- "Check for devices missing drivers on boot." Should I put a tick in that box, or not?

- How do I test this now, rather than until there's a genuine need?

Thanks

The option to check for devices missing drivers means that if you ever boot your Rescue Media and there are devices it doesn’t have drivers for, you’ll see a popup dialog about it when Rescue loads, which will have an option to provide appropriate drivers. If you uncheck that, then in that scenario, Rescue won’t tell you about it, and therefore if you want to load drivers, you’ll have to go to the Restore > View Unsupported Devices interface yourself. It just depends on whether you want to be made aware of a missing driver situation proactively or not be confronted with a popup dialog. But if you’re building it on the only system you intend to use it with, then it’s unlikely you’ll ever have a missing driver situation anyway, in which case this option won’t make a difference for you.

In terms of testing, good on you for thinking about that! The way to test is to confirm that your system boots from your Rescue Media flash drive, and then you need to make sure it can see any storage devices you would be restoring FROM (such as an external hard drive or network location) or restoring TO.(typically an internal drive). The easiest way to see local storage is to click over to the Create Backups tab and check the Local Disks view. If you see all appropriate disks there, you’re good to go. If you need to see network locations because you store backups there, then confirm you can browse to those as well. If you also want to confirm you know how to set up a restore even without having to perform one, you can try actually staging one by stepping through the entire wizard. Get all the way to the point where you see a text-based activity summary where you would click Finish. Even if you clicked Finish, you’d still have to acknowledge a warning that partitions were going to be overwritten before Reflect actually did anything, so there’s no danger that you’ll unexpectedly perform a restore you didn’t intend, but stepping through the wizard is a great way to make sure you know what you WOULD do when the need arises.

@jphughan said:

...if you’re building it on the only system you intend to use it with, then it’s unlikely you’ll ever have a missing driver situation

Good news.

@jphughan said:

...good on you for thinking about that!

Which part of Australia do you come from?  

@jphughan said:

...you need to make sure it can see any storage devices you would be restoring FROM

 

In my case, that device was an external T: drive, which was already connected at startup.

As a test, I shut down, disconnected T: then repeated the test. Now the drive is not available (I think it was marked with a red cross in the Macrium UI. 

So, that's useful knowledge. But I'm wondering when I would need to use a bootable external drive if I already have the Macrium vboot procedure installed.

Thanks

I don't come from Australia, but I had a wonderful vacation there not long ago, so that must have come through.


If sounds like the UI you were looking at was the Existing Backups tab and the red X was on an entry in the "Folders to search" list that is used for populating the Existing Backups pane.  The better place to check is the Create Backups > Local Disks tab, which shows all storage devices that are currently visible.  One reason for that is that Windows and Rescue do not always assign drive letters the same way, even though Rescue Media Builder does copy some data from Windows into Rescue Media to improve the likelihood of consistency.  But in the case of a drive letter discrepancy, it's possible to have a disk online and available within Rescue and still have a red X on that path because the disk is currently using a different drive letter.  In that case, you can use the Local Disks tab to check the currently assigned letter, then click the Edit button under Existing Backups to add the new path to the list.  Changes like that made in Rescue do not persist, fyi.

Rescue can also work with devices that are connected after it loads, but for storage devices, you'll want to click the "Refresh" link in the upper area of the Create Backups > Local Disks tab to have Reflect rescan for storage devices.

In any case, if all of your backups are on local storage, then as long as Rescue can see all of your local storage, then you're covered.  Or "happy days", to borrow further from the Aussies.


This confuses me a bit. There's a feature called viBoot (not vboot), but that allows you to boot backups as virtual machines within Windows, which has nothing to do with restoring in Rescue Media.  If on the other hand you were referring to the recovery boot menu option whereby you can boot into Rescue right off your internal drive rather than an external drive, then there are many scenarios where that will not be possible.  The files on your internal drive that facilitate that may have been deleted.  Or file system corruption might have rendered those files inaccessible.  Or ransomware might have encrypted the entire drive.  Or your drive may have simply failed, requiring you to install a new one that will be blank.  In all of those cases, the files to boot into Rescue from internal storage will not be available to you when you will likely want to perform a restore.  That is why I advise people that the recovery boot menu option should be viewed as a convenience, and while it can even be your primary means of performing restores, it should never be used as your SOLE means of doing so.  By comparison, external Rescue Media has no such dependencies on any files existing on internal storage, and therefore it CAN be used as a sole means of recovery if you don't want to deal with the boot menu option -- but even if you do, having external Rescue Media should still be considered a requirement to cover more significant incidents.

Thanks for the comments. I've copied almost all of this entire thread into my CintaNotes for future ref.

BTW:  I was referring to "recovery boot menu option".

@jphughan said:

I don't come from Australia, but I had a wonderful vacation there not long ago

Did all the blood rush to your head because you have to walk around upside down?

Thanks