Create Rescue Media Overview

This menu option enables you to create a rescue CD that can be used to help restore your hard disk should the system become corrupted to the extent that you can no longer boot it

This is one of the most important steps to take when backing up your system.  Should your computer hard drive develop faults or the operating system becomes corrupt in some way, the rescue media will prove invaluable in restoring a working system much more quickly and in a more complete state than if you had to install the operating system all over again.

What is on a rescue CD?

In order to be able to restore a partition on a PC, the partition needs to be completely unlocked by the operating system. During normal operation, the operating system locks files on the disk to prevent them being changed and causing system instability. This locking means that partitions, and in particular the active operating system partition, cannot be restored while the normal operating system is running. Equally, if you are restoring to a new blank disk, you do not have an operating system to start the PC.

Macrium Reflect provides the tools for you to create a separate operating system that loads completely into memory and therefore doesn't lock any of the files on the disk or partition. When loaded, this memory-resident operating system, lets you run Macrium Reflect and restore disk partitions. Once the partitions are restored, you can reboot into the normal operating system and use the restored partitions as normal.

Rescue Environments

Macrium Reflect has several rescue environments, but we always recommend that you utilize the Windows Pre-installation Environment (WinPE) version as driver support is more easily extended in WinPE than it is in Linux.

Windows PE based rescue environment

The Macrium Reflect v5 rescue CD now uses the latest Windows Pre-installation Environment, licensed from Microsoft. Windows PE has better native support for a wider range of PC hardware including RAID controllers, Network Interface Cards and USB 3.0 devices and is based on the latest Windows 7 OS kernel.

Unlike v4.2, the same user interface is presented when running under Windows PE as is used when running under Windows.

Linux rescue environment

The Linux Kernel is used to boot the PC and then execute Macrium Reflect. This can then be used to restore images back to the hard disk partitions.

Auto versus Pre-built WIM