Solved Macrium Rescue Media doesn't see backup drive

Aloha from Maui, new member here :) Using Macrium Reflect Home v8.o.6161. The main program sees it just fine.


When I boot to the rescue media, either USB or from the boot menu, it thinks the backup drive has an error.


If I browse for image file, I actually find it on D drive as opposed to my actual backup V drive .


Why is the rescue software reassigning a different drive letter to my backup drive? Does it need to be formatted in a specific manner? It's currently GPT/NTFS. My backup drive is a new 2TB Samsung 870 internal SSD. I'm doing this to prep for Windows 11 upgrade, in case I want to go back. But I'm liking Windows 11 so far, I'm actually dual booting it on a separate drive.

Thoughts?

Also, whats the average backup size of a typical Win 10 install with a few games, MS Office, etc.? Mine is 241GB.

Scott said:

Aloha from Maui, new user here :) Using Macrium Reflect Home v8.o.6161. The main program sees it just fine.
View attachment 9990

When I boot to the rescue media, either USB or from the boot menu, it thinks the backup drive has an error.
View attachment 9982

If I browse for image file, I actually find it on D drive as opposed to my actual backup V drive .
View attachment 9986

Why is the rescue software reassigning a different drive letter to my backup drive? Does it need to be formatted in a specific manner? It's currently GPT/NTFS. My backup drive is a new 2TB Samsung 870 internal SSD. I'm doing this to prep for Windows 11 upgrade, in case I want to go back. But I'm liking Windows 11 so far, I'm actually dual booting it on a separate drive.

Thoughts?

Also, whats the average backup size of a typical Win 10 install with a few games, MS Office, etc.? Mine is 241GB.

Click to expand...

Hi there

@Scott

The software assigns a different drive because it's based on a Windows PE / RE environment -- a minimum "Windows bare rescue" OS with drivers etc with its own boot manager which will assign volumes according to how the program loads and the order it finds the drivers --I wouldn't worry about it -- simply use the diskpart command with listvol from the command box if you get confused as to what drive is what.

I find as for size of Windows -- I have Office2019, some old W7 games, VLC, some SAP software to connect to clients SAP systems, VmWare workstation, Photoshop and a few other things and I'm using 50GB of an 80GB size disk. I have another Windows install -- defined as 80GB and the third at 60 GB (Windows 2k22 Server) .

I'm using these as "VHDX" drives on a 256GB SSD -- you could have separate partitions if using VHDX "Virtual drives" (not Virtual machines) if you want - but if you only use a single version of Windows --use a small OS partition and keep all your data etc on a separate partition -- if you hose up the OS / have to restore etc you don't lose your data when restoring (also makes backups quicker and easier).

So the backup size is around 20 - 30 GB for these Windows systems. Yours is large because you probably have a lot of data on the OS drive (private data e.g music files /. videos etc) -- always better to separate those off the OS partition.

When creating the backup USB -- choose the relevant version in the "BUILD" option -- I've found chosing the appropriate based on PE rather than the RE versions is usually far better for W10 / W11 etc -- also create the ISO and use Rufus to create a bootable USB from the ISO. Use an 8GB USB stick (max) --using bigger sticks can cause problems with NTFS boot -- shouldn't do but I've found some computers just don't like booting with USB sticks > 8GB with NTFS format -- nothing in the boot spec that should be a problem for EFI boot but some computers for one reason or another just don't like it.




For Rufus :




Cheers
jimbo

@Scott

At default compression settings (medium), the backup size will be about 1/2 the size of the data on the C:\ drive.
If you right click the C:\ drive and choose Properties, just divide the "Used Space" by two, to get the approx. size of the backups.

Thanks for the replies guys.

@jimbo45

I went a ahead and created rescue media under the WinPE environment per your recommendation. I didn't realize Rufus 3.16 could create bootable USB's that work with secure boot turned on. v3.14 couldn't.

@Ghot

So I moved my library folders to a different drive, about 200GB worth, and that brought my backup size down to 106GB. The strange thing is I tried a backup with high compression and the file size was the same.

Scott said:

So I moved my library folders to a different drive, about 200GB worth, and that brought my backup size down to 106GB. The strange thing is I tried a backup with high compression and the file size was the same.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've only made backups with compression set to medium. The higher the compression, the slower the backup.
I have 36GB on my C:\ drive. On medium compression, my backups are about 18GB.