Cloning Hard Drives with Macrium Reflect: Part 2

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In the first part, you learned how to clone your Windows hard disk with Macrium Reflect Free Edition. In this part, you will learn how to create a restoration CD using the Macrium Free Edition restore CD.

You can review the first part of this article here.

The restore discs are bootable CDs that you can use to restore any images created by Macrium Reflect. Below is a screen shot of the typical flow of the hard disk image creation to disk restoration process:

Before you can restore Windows images to your newly-installed hard drives, it is important to create a bootable restoration CD. This is the topic of this second part of the tutorial series.

Introducing Macrium Reflect Free Rescue Discs

Macrium Reflect called this restore disc a “rescue CD.” There are two types of rescue discs available: Linux-based recovery CDs and BartPE (Windows-based recovery CDs).

It is recommended that you use BartPE for your rescue CD if your computer is based on the Windows platform. This is because it can easily read NTFS file system and Windows-based devices. This makes it easy for you to retrieve clone images stored in NTFS-formatted backup external hard drives, as well as run Windows- compatible programs under the BartPE environment.

This tutorial will cover only the BartPE recovery CD, as it is much more complex to create than a Linux recovery CD.

Downloading and Installing the PE Builder

You need to go to this page: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ and then scroll down until you see the “Download” section. Download the “latest version,” “self-installing package” to your desktop.

Once the package has been successfully downloaded to your computer, double click on it to install. You need to ensure that it is installed to the root Windows system hard drive. For example, if your Windows XP was installed in Drive C, then PE Builder installation path should be in c:pebuilder3110a

Once installed, it will pop up to search for Windows installation files; just click NO. This is a screen shot of the PE Builder that you have just installed:

Next: Preparing the Windows Installation Files >>
 

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