Once more into the fray!

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[RetiredGeek]

Hey Y’all,

I know by now you’re probably tired of hearing me and some of the other regular denizens of this forum harangue you about making sure your backups are recoverable by having a tested boot device to use in booting your machine and running your recovery software. With that let me tell you a story.

As most of you know I’m a big fan of Macrium Reflect and have been using it for over a decade. What you may not know is that I create a custom Windows PE Boot Windows Image using PowerShell which is then used by Reflect to create the recovery USB drive by adding Reflect to the Boot.wim file.

This custom Boot.wim file has many Utilities (SysInternals, NirSoft, etc.) and also some Powershell scripts along with PowerShell itself which is not normally included in the WinPE environment.

Well, this has been working for years w/o issue. However, recently I decided to up my game by updating the Windows Assessment and Installation Kit (AIK) from version 1903 to version 2004. This went smoothly and then I regenerated my Reflect recovery USBs, yes I have several! These were tested to confirm boot and running Reflect.

Well, the other day I ran into a problem where my Windows Key wouldn’t work (turned out to be a stupid key on my Logitech G710+ got pushed to place the keyboard into gaming mode which I never used and I missed it!) So since I didn’t see that I started to do everything I could think of to solve the problem to no avail, so time to restore my last C: drive image taken only 3 days before.

I booted using the USB Reflect recovery drive which automatically started Reflect. So far so good. Then I went to search for my image (on an external USB hard drive dock) and low and behold it did not show up. Check all connections and reboot. Still no love. So try the previous 2 week old image…same result.

Just wonderful so what do I do now? Well, I decided to create a USB recovery drive using Reflect w/o pointing it to my custom boot.wim file. Well that solved the problem with seeing the dock and by images, however, restoring the 3 day old image did NOT solve the problem! Now it’s 12:30am and I’m pulling out what little hair I have left and I finally see the darn little light. One click and things are fixed, except I still don’t know why all of the sudden my custom boot.wim didn’t work.

So once again it’s head scratching time. Finally, I remembered that I had updated the AIK, luckily I still had the download for the old 1903 version. So I uninstalled the 2004 version and reloaded the 1903 version, regenerated the custom boot.wim via Powershell, and recreated the Reflect Rescue Disk and all is well once again.

However, I still don’t know why the 2004 version would not see the USB Dock and unfortunately figuring that one out is beyond my pay grade!

The MORAL of this little story is if you’re making changes to your backup setup make sure you TEST EVERYTHING!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

• This topic was modified 5 months, 2 weeks ago by RetiredGeek.

9 users thanked author for this post.

DriftyDonN, joep517, wavy, SueW, oldfry, Trev, bbearren, geekdom, NaNoNyMouse

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RetiredGeek wrote:

I’m a big fan of Macrium Reflect and have been using it for over a decade. What you may not know is that I create a custom Windows PE Boot Windows Image using PowerShell which is then used by Reflect to create the recovery USB drive by adding Reflect to the Boot.wim file.

Same here, RG, but Image For Windows instead of Macrium Reflect for me.  Instead of using PowerShell, I use the scripts provided by TeraByte to incorporate it into the Windows Recovery Environment partition that Windows puts on the OS disk just behind the OS partition.  My customization is to move the WinRE to its own partition on a separate disk, so that if my OS drive goes belly up I can replace it and still get into the WinRE partition to restore the drive images to the replacement.

With every major iteration of Windows, (OS Build xxxxx.xxx), I upgrade my WinRE, and with every iteration of Image For Windows, I also upgrade my TBWinRE.  Of course, I also update my USB thumb drives, but I very seldom use it, following instead Settings > Windows Update > Advanced options > Recovery > Advanced startup > Restart now, which lets me boot directly to the TBWinRE partition.  From there I can do anything I can do from the USB thumb drive.

I’m also 100% with you here:

RetiredGeek wrote:

… making sure your backups are recoverable by having a tested boot device to use in booting your machine and running your recovery software.

… as well as making fresh drive images regularly, as stated in my signature line.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We were all once "Average Users". We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do to our systems, we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

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4 users thanked author for this post.

joep517, oldfry, geekdom, RetiredGeek

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So what does game mode do??

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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wavy wrote:

So what does game mode do??

Windows Game Mode.

Always create a fresh drive image before making system changes/Windows updates; you may need to start over!

We were all once "Average Users". We all have our own reasons for doing the things that we do to our systems, we don't need anyone's approval, and we don't all have to do the same things.

Computer Specs

1 user thanked author for this post.

wavy

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No need for that for me, found it on turned it off.
Good to know.

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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