Free Macrium image restore with Win 8.1 dual boot

kscott

New Member
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This weekend I had too much time on hand and decided to do some acid testing of the free Macrium restore capabilities. Straight forward restores of images using the PE environment were flawless. I was curious to learn if the free version had the capability to move a restore partition to a different target disk location as advertised. Reading of the entire help file did not indicate that this was limited to only the paid editions.

My set-up is dual boot with Vista on partition 1 (C:), and Win 8.1 on partition 2 (K:). For those Vista haters, my wife loves it and I had to keep it for her use.

My conclusion is do not move the Win 8.1 partition if it's normal drive letter is not C:. Moving the partition seems to force reassignment of a different drive letter to Win 8.1 which hoses access to your user files and profiles. Also, Win 8.1 will not complete loading after user sign on to a generally blue screen. It seems that moving the Win 8.1 partition changes the partition ID number which windows uses for drive and user profile assignment. I suspect, but could not confirm that if Win 8.1 partition is normally assigned as the C: drive this may not be an issue.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1.1
Depending on how you set up the dual boot.
  1. If you installed Vista first, Windows 8.1 2nd then Windows will use the Vista boot loader
  2. If you installed Windows 8.1 first, Vista 2nd then Windows will use Windows 8.1 bootloader.
Now,
  1. When you boot into Windows Vista, Windows will automatically assign C: drive to Vista and assign a different letter to Windows 8.1
  2. When you boot into Windows 8.1, Windows will swap the drive letters with Windows Vista. ie. Windows 8.1 is now drive C: and Windows Vista with the drive letter which was assigned to Windows 8.1 in step 1.

After moving Windows 8.1 to a partition on another drive. If under Vista, Windows 8.1 is assigned to another drive letter then you need to open the elevated command prompt and type: bcdboot X:\Windows where X is the newly assigned drive letter to reflect the change in the BCD (Boot Configuration Data).
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    8.1x64PWMC Ubuntu14.04x64 MintMate17x64
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Home Brewed
    CPU
    I7 4970K OC'ed @4.7 GHz
    Motherboard
    MSI-Z97
    Memory
    16 GB G-Skill Trident X @2400MHZ
    Graphics Card(s)
    NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450
    Sound Card
    X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Dual HP-W2408
    Screen Resolution
    1920X1200
    Hard Drives
    256 GB M2 sm951, (2) 500GB 850EVO, 5TB, 2 TB Seagate
    PSU
    Antec 850W
    Case
    Antec 1200
    Cooling
    Danger Den H20
    Keyboard
    Logitech
    Mouse
    Logitech Performance Mouse MX
    Internet Speed
    35/12mbps
    Browser
    Firefox
My Win 8.1 installation stays on partition K: regardless of which system is booted. With the moved partition it does boot into the log-in screen and allows password entry. After that, it will not continue to the Metro start screen as it never finds the user profile which is apparently tied to the original partition ID/drive letter.

In my testing I also moved the bootloader from the Vista to the Win8.1 partition. Also tried deleting the Vista partition to remove the dual boot. All boot changes were with using EasyBCD.

All of the above was also performed while not moving the Win 8.1 as a control test for comparison. Net result; do not move the partition and all is well, move Win 8.1 and it is hosed.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1.1
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