Testing Rescue Medium Flash Drive

I made a Rescue Medium flash drive in Macrium Reflect and tried to test it by going into the BIOS and doing Devices > USB, but regardless of the Boot Sequence I selected in Startup (Primary, Automatic or Error), the computer booted up just fine without the flash drive inserted in the USB port.

Then I read that in order to be bootable, a USB device needs to have a master boot record in its boot sector.

It seems to me that Macrium must have handled that, but I thought maybe I should test it.

So then I read that an easy way to test this is with a Windows program called MobaLiveCD, available here.

Does anybody know anything about this program and if this is the way to go, or what I should do if it isn't?

 

Are you saying that the computer wouldn't boot to the flash drive?

The Macrium rescue media simply restores a Macrium image you created to the hard drive.

I'm not so sure about MobaLiveCD. I tried it on a Win 7 installation ISO (Windows based) and a DR Web Live CD ISO (Linux based) and couldn't get it to work. Fortunately, I didn't have anything to uninstall afterward.

 

Does the PC have a boot option to select boot device? Like hit F10, F11, F12, F2?? Some BIOs will let you select a temporary boot device.
I have used MobaLivewith mixed results, but it is portable like mdonah said.
Can you tell us more about the PC? model, motherboard?

 

With what and how did you get MobaLiveCD to work?

I generally don't "test" bootable ISOs or USB Flash drives because I've not run into any problems with them. My test of Moba today was under Windows 10 — did that have anything to do with it?

 

I don't know if it WOULDN'T, but it certainly DIDN'T, since I tried it without the flash drive inserted into a USB port in order to test it. Whether or not it TRIED to boot from the flash drive before giving up on that and subsequently booting from the hard drive without giving an error message, I don't know.

My understanding is that although Macrium can create an image of one or more drives, the rescue medium per se is just the OS.

Yeah, thanks for the suggestion, F12 brought up the boot option. I GUESS it worked - when I selected USB with the Rescue Media flash drive inserted, it booted normally, but when I tried it WITHOUT the flash drive inserted, the USB option didn't appear.

Well, as I said, I tried Devices > USB in the BIOS, but seemingly to no effect.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M75e 5042A7U (that's machine type: 5042, model number: A7U)
Processors: ACPI x64-based PC with 4 AMD Athlon II X4 640 Processors 3.00 GHz
RAM: 4.00 GB (3.75 GB usable)
System type: 64-bit OS

OS: Windows 7 Professional, Service Pack 1

Macrium recommends testing the Rescue Media flash drive after creating it.

 

I suspect you have never seen THIS. It describes how you prepare a flash drive to make it bootable as most flash drives are not bootable as sold and Macrium's create rescue media doesn't do it for you.

 

If you downloaded Macrium AND one of the PE environments, Macrium creates a Windows based bootable CD which contains a "mini" OS along with the Macrium app. As Earthling states, it doesn't make a flash drive bootable.

It's fortunate that Macrium allows the incorporation of the Win PE (Preinstalled Environment) without having to have WAIK or WADK installed on your system (upwards of 6 GB of hard disk savings).

 

In preparing the USB stick for Windows PE, I'm seeing this:

DISK LIST> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 465 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Online 3835 GB 0 B

DISK LIST>

(Sorry, the reply entry box doesn't allow strings of spaces.)

Anyway, neither one of these looks like my USB stick, which is an old 4 GB one, 3.73 GB usable, all of it free. Any recommendations?

 

Not from me, we're off on our winter hols in the morning. No geeking allowed for two weeks now

 

Above, Earthling had provided a link to Preparing a USB stick for Windows PE (written by someone at Macrium).

There, it said to enter "list disks" when running diskpart. It turns out to see ALL of the computer's volumes, even the ones that AREN'T disks (such as a flash drive), you actually have to enter "list volumes".

Anyway, after creating a primary partition on the flash drive and making it active, you're supposed to format the newly created partition for the computer's file system, either NTFS (under which booting is done from a Master Boot Record), or the newer UEFI (under which the boot files must reside on a FAT32 partition).

Online research SEEMED to indicate that the file system was determined by the hardware, but I was unable to confirm that. I DO know that a machine running Win7 (like mine currently does) can be either NTFS or UEFI. Most references that I found to machines running Win10 mentioned EUFI, although most references to machines running Win7 mentioned NTFS, but people upgrade from Win7 to Win10 all the time (as I intend to do), so I didn't know what to think.

So I called Lenovo to ask them which file system was used by my ThinkCentre M75e 5042A7U. But even "tier 2" didn't know, even going so far as to say my question was "out of scope" (presumably of what might reasonably be asked of tech support).

Well, I guessed NTFS and that's the way I formatted the flash drive. If I was wrong, I can always start over.

Any opinions on this?

 

Never mind. I ran diskpart again and discovered that the three partitions on C: are all NTFS. And since that's how I formatted the flash drive, all is well.

 

OK, the Rescue Media flash drive works fine. I booted up with it for this very session, in fact.

 

Hey, I see now that the Macrium Reflect that I downloaded from MG and installed has a Rescue Media Wizard (Create bootable rescue media), as well as an option Other Tasks > Add Recovery Boot Menu Option. Could I have used Macrium to create the Master Boot Record on the Rescue Media, rather than making it myself as I did?