bartholomewking

OK, I did successful a test demonstrating in this instance, i.e. my case that Speedstep is the problem. I stress that, but in so saying it is likely to apply for others also. (yes, it's a disclaimer!) I proceeded as follows: FIrst, booted into BIOS (F2 in my case) and turned OFF Speedstep, and saved settings. Restarted the machine. I booted from the Macrium PE partition on my system drive (this is created from the Macrium Reflect application menu): Other Tasks > Add Recovery Boot Menu Option ... After this option is set the option to boot appears on a boot time menu when you reboot the machine.) Start up the machine I choose the Boot Menu option to go into the Macrium Reflect PE environment. (you can also boot from CD or USB stick from BIOS) NB, partitions will be overwritten, so if something goes wrong, then a USB or CD is essential once booted, (the DOS stuff optional) open a command shell (CMD), enter the commands below to change the power scheme i.e. make it run a little quicker. Worked for me you can also run taskmgr from the CMD environment to see what the machine is actually up to. choose the required partions for restore, press restore and there it is DOS (CMD) commands: to list the available power schemes ( i.e. performance) X:\Windows\System32>powercfg /L Existing Power Schemes (* Active) ----------------------------------- Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced) * Power Scheme GUID: ce0fbd01-98fc-442c-b326-d8df81d29e84 (High Performance) Power Scheme GUID: d82a8bef-8323-45c7-a201-45e5369f5b56 (Power Saver) to change the power scheme, powercfg with the /S option followed by the GUID of the desired scheme X:\Windows\System32>powercfg /S ce0fbd01-98fc-442c-b326-d8df81d29e84 X:\Windows\System32>powercfg /L Existing Power Schemes (* Active) ----------------------------------- Power Scheme GUID: 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e (Balanced) Power Scheme GUID: ce0fbd01-98fc-442c-b326-d8df81d29e84 (High Performance) * Power Scheme GUID: d82a8bef-8323-45c7-a201-45e5369f5b56 (Power Saver) The above change the power scheme. In my case at boot the default was the balanced scheme. I saw one report showing that the default was the High Performance, but in my instance this was not so. Obviously the GUIDs may be different. Not sure, but possibly. These steps aren't actually necessary but may speed things up a bit. This restored my partitions in about 50 minutes with no problem. Anadavari's earelier point about the chkdsk /R is also relevant I think. good and prudent. The fact that Throttlestop exists at all, and that all hell broke loose not long ago when the version in the wild became unlicensed, and thus ceased to function, without notice proves that similar related problems exist on other makes and model of system. (Throttlestop is an excellent bit of software for controlling PC performance, and is available at Techpowerup as a free download). I guess that had I been more patient, that the restore would have succeeded but I did wait for 10 minutes or so staring at a darkened disc activity light before I decided something was wrong. I mentioned in an earlier post about Hirens boot CD. Well it turns out it's explicitly Not a CD, but A USB utility, and it looks great. It does include within its PE the Macrium PE. In other words, you can start up a Macrium Reflect session from within a windows environment with all the discs dismounted. There's also a plethora of useful utilities like the old XP version ... Every home should have one. I consider this a solution for my problem and hope others may find it helpful. This is a solution for a Dell Latitude Laptop, but read between the lines ... Cheers!

Hi, I don’t believe it’s a heat issue so much, the machine runs within thermal specs. the references I made towards throttling may be relevant, but aren't an issue generally. the use of Throttlestop and HWinfo64 cure it to all practical purposes. The cause of the throttling is the way that the Dell machines of this series (circa 2010) deal with different capacity power supplies, e-ports and thermal control. It's just plain buggy! A google search on the subject will find thousands trying to solve the problem. I use Throttlestop and HWinfo64 to alleviate that. HWinfo64 may seem odd to mention in this context, but it has fan control that works for the Dell, it doesn't fight with the built-in fan control. Speedfan (I mentioned before) fights with the built-in control I found, so the fan is constantly revving up and down. Speedstep slows the fan, system increases and so on. This then sounds almost like heavy breathing and leads to neurosis and paranoia. It is also a poor accompaniment to music recording with a microphone. These factors are not so much of an issue, if the machine is run on external power, but with all peripherals disconnected. i.e. bare bones, just enough to do the required restore task, 1 external USB drive with the backup on it, no e-port, additional discs and all other USB stuff disconnected. Of course, in PE neither Throttlestop or HWinfo64 are running. But, I think all that is a digression from the restore issue. It could be contributing, but the system doesn't exhibit extreme throttling symptoms. e.g. you can still move the mouse about, other items in the PE environment seem to be working. I've since found out, that Task Manager or a variant thereof, can be run from within the PE environment. I would certainly have used that had I known at the time to get a better idea of what was going on. Speedstep on the other hand may be significant, but a significance yet to be tested. This involves the control of the idle states in the processor. It can be configured on and off in the BIOS. Generally, I have it on. When it is I get event viewer messages complaining that the Bios is controlling the processor state i.e. Event 37: The speed of processor X in group Y is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 71 seconds since the last report. (these come in groups of 4, one for each logical processor) I think this is a symptom of an older BIOS, a newer Windows 10 and a misunderstanding between the two. Hence Dell does not "support" these older machines under Win 10. The processor can burst up to its max state and also be throttled by the Firmware/Hardware when Speedstep is enabled. For most things Speedstep doesn’t make a lot of difference, but I'm sure for games, and certainly for realtime audio it can be beneficial. While writing the previous paragraph I found a link entitled "Slow Backup or Restore under Windows PE Rescue Media with Intel SpeedStep" the content of which looks uncannily familiar! https://forum.macrium.com/Topic22409.aspx This only goes to show that GI(not always)YF OK ..... TESTING TESTING TESTING. Testing is all that can be done now. But, understandably I'm not in a hurry to do that. I will inevitably have to at some point, and I have the backstop of a second machine. Should things go awry. But I've found these additional things. in the PE run a CMD shell, and type taskmgr. the link above to macrium also talks about powercfg. Exploring the PE environment's command shell looks like a very good idea. however, "Help" and "?" don't work so it has to be RTFM i'm afraid. There is a new version of Hirens Boot CD PE for WIndows 10. It has Reflect in it. To what extent and how it works at this point I don't know. I found it late last night, and got no further than buring the ISO. That by itself could be excellent news! The old Windows XP version was a life saver. It's all horribly complicated and there are far too many variables. Thanks so much Andavari and Hazelnut. I don't consider this solved or closed, but now the next step seems obvious. I will report my findings ..... If anybody else tries anything like it, it would be interesting to know. Kindest Felicitations and Cheers!!

The backups are run on a schedule each day at about 5.00am. I did this for a long time before the SSD. the only time I've had a problem is with the SSD. There is of course all the oddness of Trim on an SSD, and I notice that Reflect gives the option of Trim or not to Trim on restore. I must admit I didn't try all the permutations . I just wanted to restore, not wear the damn thing out. It took about four attempts before I suceeded. You can mount the backups while in Win 10, find all the files you want and restore them en mass or individually without issue., the Boot and Rescue partitions are there. Like I said, I can only not restore it when it's mounted in the Laptop itself running from the Macrium Boot PE environment (irrespective of medium, eg USB/Disc/Recovery Partition), and this worked just fine with HDD. When I mount the disc in another machine, I can restore the very same backup fine, but that machine is up and running in Windows 10 and not Windows PE. also of course it's a different machine with different hardware. It's a Dell XPS 430. Clone does work, as that is how I transferred the operating system in the first place. i.e. HDD cloned onto SSD. SSD is a little bigger so had to move the partitions around a little afterwards, but it all worked without any issue that I noticed. Clone would not be useful for me as a daily backup regime however as it would consume too much data and time. I'm erring towards thinking it being a hardware/firmware foible of the Dell Laptop. I made a comment in the original post about Speedstep. I've had some wierdness with this technology on this very same laptop. The Dell Latitude series is notorious for strange fan behaivour and throttling. It gets more peculiar with a docking station, or e-port as they call it. The machine is actually not supported as such under Windows 10, just a little too old. Last supported windows is Win 7 64bit. It's pretty much unusable without running Throttlestop, and I use HWinfo64 to control the fan. Speedfan just fights with the BIOS and it starts to sound like an anonymous nuisance telephone caller. If you don't use Throttlestop the throttling will set in and the machine will perform very poorly, to the point that it becomes unusable. . There are pages and pages about that sort of thing on Dell forums. The Bios is updated to the latest available. Contrarywise, it has worked (i.e. restore) in the past reliably with HDD. Mentioning Windows 7 above makes me think that a trial of a Windows 7 based PE might be a good idea. I'd do an experiment of disabling Speedstep and trying the restore when I get the inclination or necessity. It's just very time consuming, and of course as it's my main machine a nuisance to do so. Still, knowing the answer would be a good thing. When the machine is in the PE environment, the restore just appears to stop. It could be ( after considering what I just wrote) the throttling coming into play. One of the weird things that happens is that the machine Restarts increadibly slowly compared to a cold start when Speedstep is enabled. I'll admit the Speedstep thing only came to mind after all this, and I didn't try a restore with it disabled. Just too many variables and too little time. Plus I don't want to wear out my shiny new disc, people get paranoid about where to put the swapspace when they have an SSD! I don't want to be repeatedly re-formatting it to get an answer. On the other hand I don't want to lose my data. what a conundrum.

I ran a chkdsk /R. there are no bad blocks. Hmmm....

Hello there. It was a standard disc image + a differential. i.e. i restored from the latest differential. I have done this lots of times before (but mostly to HDD). I tried restoring the partitions separately ( there were 3 on the disc ). but that didn't work either.... that is two of the partitions did restore, but they were small. they would be the boot and recovery partitions. the system partition seemed to be the one in which the freeze took place, but this obviously is the bulk of the size, the other two being < a Gig in total. The machine was on power throughout. The SSD is pretty new (approx 4mths) I will give it a chkdsk /R at some point soon just to be certain. that's a good point. I did however at one stage wipe the thing with mini partition tool. no guarantee that would have picked up anything dodgy though. I regularly chkdsk all discs (/F), no problems. the intersting point is that it will restore on the other machine without apparent issue. The only time I see an issue is under the circumstance I described. will run the chkdsk /R soonest and see.

Thankyou for that, I tried Macrium, but it asked for my serial and said it was not valid. I guessed that just for the Free version they don't allow forum access. I'll have a look at the Wilder's one. Cheers!

Hello there, I was hoping that somebody may be familiar with this problem. It’s been a while since I have been on this forum, and since the last time my systems have changed considerably. My main machine is a Dell Latitude E6410 (i5-520M) laptop with the latest BIOS running 64bit Windows 10 (pro), with a Qumox (Maxmemory X100) 256GB SSD. There appear to be no special drivers for this disc. I am running Macrium Reflect (free edition 64bit v7.1.3317) as backup software. I use a weekly turnaround, full system disc image on a Sunday, differential every weekday and Saturday, each verified during that process. Like many others I downloaded and installed the now notorious W10 October update. This installed without serious incident, however I ran into a few irritating problems afterwards. The most significant was performance related (Dell - Intel Chipset?), and there were others that banged my OCD bone beyond tolerance. When it became apparent that there was not going to be a fix soon, I decided to restore the final image I made prior to all this. On attempting to restore: I used the Macrium Boot Windows PE from the boot disk. I then tried the USB stick with the PE environment. I then tried a CD All of the above booted as expected and the restore ran, but only partially. In each instance the restore proceeded as expected, but then after a while the disc activity light stopped, and no further activity took place. The PE environment still seemed to be active, but did not finish the restore. I may have given up prematurely, but it looked to me like nothing further was happening. I installed the SSD disc in another (desktop) machine and removed the partitions from it entirely. I returned it to the laptop and tried again. The same symptoms. Restore ran with constant disc activity, then apparently ceased anywhere from approx. 9 – 40%. I waited a while, but after several minutes gave up, this being pretty time consuming and not without stress. Eventually the solution I chose was to connect up the SSD in another (desktop) machine and run an image restore of the same backup but on that other machine while it was running full Windows 10 (again 64bit). That was successful and without incident. The laptop is back up and running perfectly with the previous 1803 version of Win 10. I think this is likely to be some sort of foible with the Dell Laptop and SSD discs, the machine is quite old. I have succeeded in the past with this scenario on this same machine, but did have difficulty with the SSD .. taking a couple of attempts before success. Before I had no difficulty restoring to a 7200rpm 250GB HDD that it replaced, and did this on a number of occasions when the HDD was installed. There does not appear to be a problem with any of the hardware involved, and the system works pretty well and passes every test I can think of. I have an inkling that having Speedstep being turned on in the BIOS may be a factor, but just got too fed up to test that theory. I’m pretty sure that I tried to do the whole restore thing with nothing other than an external USB disc and the laptop undocked and other external and internal discs removed. Next time, I’ll be more circumspect, but for the time being I don’t want to go through the exercise again without good reason. The 'good reason' of course, is likely in the pipeline with the re-issue of the Windows 10 October update, which this time I have deferred in the update settings for as long as possible as a configurable screen grab and paste buffer really aren't worth that much trouble. Any thoughts on this matter would be very gratefully received, especially experiences of any similar experiences. Kind Regards and thanks in anticipation.

Yes Mta, it's from many sad and bitter experiences over the years

Just out of interest: There appears to be a known bug in earlier Linux Kernels that fail to pick up on some SATA interfaces Transcribed from photo mentioned in post #19 above as my machine attempts to attach one of the SATA drives: ata1.00:failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x40) ata1.00:disabled ata1:exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen t4 ata1:irq_stat 0x48000000, interface fatal error ata1:hard resetting link i.e. the system cannot attach the device This would explain some of the discrepencies described in the same post.

I found a download. You have to go back as far as version Macrium Reflect 5.2.6526 http://filehippo.com/download_macrium_reflect/57471/ to get the actual installer [edit link corrected] . Later versions download a stub that downloads an installer, and points at the latest version even though it says version 5 by the looks of it. This version does enable the creation of Linux Based and the earlier Windows PE 3.1 quote from the Rescue Media Wizard: "Linux provides a compact and efficient rescue environment to restore all Windows operating systems. Note: This option enables you to restore your imaged partitions to exactly the same size and position as they were at the time the image was created. If you require greater flexibility then choose the Window PE edition" I'll see how it goes and let you know.

Thank you Hazelnut. He he, ok, perhaps I was a little hasty! That little lot should keep me from hibernating this winter

Could the legend on the button have the words "You Cannot" added to it? We would probably all like that

Hi Mta, I was just testing out the product. Everything I ran was from Windows. However I wanted to see what would happen in a simulated disaster recovery situation, as I suspected there might be some problems with my drivers from past experience. Also, it would more likely be quicker to run a backup from the Recovery Medium as the machine is doing nothing else, no multitasking as such, nothing else going on, and all files as they were at the time that the machine was shut down. The disc image produced would be as near perfect as it could be ... in theory (remember my little firefox problem earlier in the thread?) For others reading this: if your system disc gets trashed for some reason, you need to restore a backup image to it. In that instance you would (probably) need to run the PE environment from a USB disc/stick or a DVD. You can install the Recovery Environment as an alternative boot option on the system disc, but in the event that a disc drive actually fails, it's a bit like nailing the life raft to the deck of the Titanic. Windows PE is a subset of Windows. It is a Microsoft Product, and to a certain extent independent of the version of operating system you are using. It can be modified by the OEM (in this instance Macrium) it gives you a limited set of Windows functionality tailored by the software author. So, it is more or less limited to booting, allowing you to save data and create images or clones, and more importantly to restore them without booting into Windows proper. The Macrium variant of PE also allows access to the command line. The Paragon products I have mentioned earlier can do similar things. They have a package called Paragon Rescue Kit (based also on PE but also can be Linux based I seem to recall). It too creates their version of an environment specifically for backup and restore, and fixing boot problems, the proprietary bit of each manufacturer's version understands their particular backup format. There is an article with more detail here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766093%28v=ws.10%29.aspx (I think it’s a little out of date, but gives the gist) With any of these backup software suites it is imperative to create some sort of boot medium for the circumstance in which the boot drive is corrupted/damaged/written off, otherwise the machine could become unusable and all the data on the internal boot medium (i.e. system hard drive) lost. When I say unusable, I mean until access to a recovery disc and the ability to restore from a backup. In Macrium one of the things that is necessary is to create the boot medium, or Rescue Media as the MR software calls it. Under the menu item "other tasks" at the top of the main menu in MR there is an option to create such an item (the program tells you do this when it is run, unless you uncheck the nag screen). It gives you the opportunity to write the PE environment (or mini-operating system) to a bootable USB memory stick, or a DVD. These should be retained and put to one side for security. If there is a failure of the boot drive for some reason on the machine e.g. corruption sufficient to make the machine impossible to start up, then these can be used to rescue the situation. Myself I would knock out a couple of DVDs and put them securely to one side. My prejudice would be to use a DVD+R. USB memory sticks are all very well and portable, but can easily be written over, swallowed or flushed down the toilet ... and that would be bad As the recovery environment is built, drivers are loaded onto it from the host machine upon which it was created, so that it will (actually, should) work for that machine. It is possible that not all the drivers required would be on Recovery Media created on another machine. (that would certainly be the case on my system for example). On my system, the snag appears to be that the generic Windows PE environment is built upon the Windows 7 kernel, so the drivers for my SATA devices which date back only to XP and not beyond, are not understood. There do not appear to be any later versions available, although rather oddly, I can install Vista and it does see the discs. Sadly I haven't found a way of extracting them from the Vista installation disc. One of the significant changes from XP to Vista and subsequent Microsoft operating systems was the structure of device drivers. The net upshot is that I can't access two of the discs on my box from the Recovery Environment in the situation that the boot drive is disfunctional. It seemed prudent therefore to test for such and other unexpected circumstances, as all the backups in the world are useless if one doesn't have the means to restore them! Version 5 of the product had the means to create Linux based, and for that matter BartPE recovery discs, that would probably solve my particular problem. I had a look at the Macrium user forum, and the answer to the question why was it no longer available was something along the lines of “it’s expensive to maintain, and not many people use it”. They have no current plans to re-introduce this feature, but will bear it in mind. Unfortunately the download from the site, only downloads a downloader for the installer program, and that is now version 6. Sites claiming to host version 5 point at the downloader. This downloads version 6. I suspect though if there is a version 5 setup that somebody has extracted in the past, then you might install more than you bargained for!

Hello all and @Mta, I did an uncompressed backup of my Linux partition and in summary this was indeed quicker. Macrium Reported: I/O Performance: Read 545.6 Mb/s - Write 172.3 Mb/s CPU usage was also notably lower, running around about 25% most of the time. Sadly the backup did not complete as the backup device ran out of free space, and I haven’t got any more readily available. The bad part about this was it didn’t warn before attempting to do the backup that this might happen, and the good part was that invited a secondary location when it encountered the problem so that it could continue. For me very sadly I cannot realistically use the product on my machine. It’s a driver issue. I can’t find drivers for the SATA/RAID device on the motherboard I have that run under windows 7. I don’t think they exist. Therefore the Windows PE environment does not find the SATA discs on my system. As I’ve got something that is proven and works for me I will continue with that. However I will put this for myself on the back burner and certainly re-examine this product when I have a newer machine running. It seems an excellent product and many of the features look superb. For me it’s not an XP issue, it’s a driver issue but I would encourage XP users with older machines to ensure that a restore is possible from the PE environment booted either from a USB memory stick or a DVD just to ensure there are no unpleasant surprises . I’ll probably leave it installed on the machine as it has some extremely useful features that could be otherwise employed. There is a possibility of digging the drivers from a Vista install CD, I know they work because I’ve had Vista running on this box, however I can’t easily find them, and to be honest at this point it probably isn’t worth the time and effort. Hope this info has helped. N.B. The above apply to version 6 of Macrium Reflect. Version 5 inlcuded a Linux Boot Disc. Macrium don't seem to allow a download of this version, and the Version 5 boot disc cannot understand version 6 archives I have read.