(Still using V 7.3.6391 and happy with it)
Yesterday I used Macrium Reflect in anger! My main SSD had become stuffed after a dratted W10 Microsoft pushed update (how I hate those!).
 Macrium Reflect saved my life.
I used the DVD rescue media, and by sheer good fortune my image was only one day old.
However I seem to recall that USB rescue media did not work when I tried it some years ago.
This puzzles me. On the on hand the manual says can use USB rescue media BUT in the same manual it says 'Cannot boot from a USB drive (being a Windows 10 limitation).'
As new PCs often do not have DVD drives, can USB drives be used? If not, how to restore?
BTW, I noticed that on the backup drive the image must be in a folder. It cannot be in the root.

Is anyone successfully using USB drives as rescue media?

The preferred method would be to use a 16gb or larger USB flash drive to boot into the rescue environment for restoring.  It contains a scaled down version of Windows (WinRE or WinPE) and a full version of Macrium Reflect with minor differences, (no definition files, scripts, CBT, MIG).

I believe the USB limitation you refer to applies to booting into the normal Windows environment (not rescue).  It's my understanding that you cannot boot Windows from an external USB device.

+x

 

Rusk4d - 21 December 2022 6:33 AM

Is anyone successfully using USB drives as rescue media?

Yes, I have literally a dozen or more USB boot media devices that I can use with Macrium.  They range from USB HDD WD Passport drives to USB thumb drives.  

I am not sure what your cited quote 'Cannot boot from a USB drive (being a Windows 10 limitation).' is from but I think it is refereeing to something else.

I have a few dedicated USB drives, older smaller USB thumb drives, setup as dedicated recovery media.  The rest I use a cool tool called Easy2Boot to boot directly from the ISO file that MR can created, regardless, they all work, and work well.

Round up a USB drive, insert it and visit the OTHER TASKS -> CREATE RESCUE MEDIA menu option and create the media.  Leave it inserted and reboot the PC, trip whatever key combination that your brand of computer uses to activate the boot menu and select the stick to boot.  For some Dell laptops it will not boot to USB sometimes unless you turn off Secure Boot in the SETUP (BIOS).  

+x

 

Rootman - 21 December 2022 12:58 PM

+x

 

Rusk4d - 21 December 2022 6:33 AM

Is anyone successfully using USB drives as rescue media?

Yes, I have literally a dozen or more USB boot media devices that I can use with Macrium.  They range from USB HDD WD Passport drives to USB thumb drives.  

I am not sure what your cited quote 'Cannot boot from a USB drive (being a Windows 10 limitation).' is from but I think it is refereeing to something else.

I have a few dedicated USB drives, older smaller USB thumb drives, setup as dedicated recovery media.  The rest I use a cool tool called Easy2Boot to boot directly from the ISO file that MR can created, regardless, they all work, and work well.

Round up a USB drive, insert it and visit the OTHER TASKS -> CREATE RESCUE MEDIA menu option and create the media.  Leave it inserted and reboot the PC, trip whatever key combination that your brand of computer uses to activate the boot menu and select the stick to boot.  For some Dell laptops it will not boot to USB sometimes unless you turn off Secure Boot in the SETUP (BIOS).  

I should have indicated that using a small flash drive would be "my preferred method".  Also, would the external USB device need to be formatted FAT32? 

EDIT:  I just inserted an external USB WD passport drive that was formatted FAT32.  Rescue found the drive was unsupported as it is GPT.  I assume the drive must be converted to MBR before it's usable.  Is this correct?

Some flash drives cannot be used for Rescue Media.  I think they're referred to as fixed class devices.  But, those are generally the really large capacity flash drives.  I've got 2 different flash drives in use for Rescue Media and have been using them for years.  Flash drives are probably the preferred media because they write so much faster and boot faster than CD/DVD.


There are some flash drives that cannot be made bootable, even if they are smaller sized ones.  I remember some SanDisk flash drives being particularly problematic years ago about this issue.  You couldn't use them for Rescue Media, Windows installation media, or any bootable flash drive situation.

It’s hard to tell for certain with no context provided, but the “cannot boot from USB drive” reference might be from the cloning section of the manual, where that note means that FULL WINDOWS cannot boot from a storage device attached via USB due to restrictions imposed by Microsoft. That note is there because some users clone to a disk that is connected via USB, try to boot from that disk as a test, and wonder why it doesn’t succeed. But that has nothing at all to do with Rescue Media, which uses Windows PE/RE rather than full Windows, and therefore has no such limitation.

You can definitely have Reflect send backups to the root of a drive, though I don’t recommend this.

@jphughan


What are your particular misgivings about putting images in the root directory of a drive?  I put images on flash drives, but they're in folder structure hierarchies with descriptive names so I know what's what.  And I do the same for my USB HDD image repository and one I have for temporary images on an internal SATA HDD.

The default NTFS permissions for files directly on the root of a drive are different from those inside a folder. Also, it just seems unnecessary.

I was able to create rescue media on an external WD 930GB Passport USB Drive.  The process involved converting the drive from GPT to MBR and formatting it FAT32.  The disk boots into rescue and sees all drives/images necessary to restore.