creating winre boot disk

[Brian K]

squish wrote:
> I have searched the win7 install disc. no winre there either.

I assume it's the same as Win8. In the Win8 disk winre.wim is in install.wim.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

It appears that WinRE has been broken and the file no longer exists on the partition.

You can copy the winre.wim file from the Windows 7 installation DVD by doing the following:

1. Make a folder on an internal drive (folder needs to be empty).

2. Open an Administrator Command Prompt.

3. Mount the install.wim file on the DVD to the folder. In this example, D: is the DVD drive and E:\win7-install is the folder.
Run this command:
dism /Mount-Wim /WimFile:"D:\sources\install.wim" /index:2 /MountDir:"E:\win7-install" /readonly

4. Browse to the E:\win7-install\Windows\System32\Recovery folder and copy out the winre.wim file (e.g. place it into the TBWinRE\WinRE_Backup folder).

5. Unmount the install.wim file. Run this command:
dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:"E:\win7-install" /discard

[squish]

Wow, that was a battle. I can't believe that I started with computers using dos, before windows. don't think I could do that again, at least not from admin command prompt. too much retyping. did it 7 times before getting through typing errors, a-v scanner needing off, file manager needing off, etc. eventually I unmounted and tried it again. I now have a winre file saved to terabyte backup folder. do you recommend doing anything else with it, other than storing it in the vs backup folder?

the recover disk is done. I have tried booting from it, using F12 at startup, and got to the terrabyte window. so looks like it is good.

thanks a lot for the help.

any other suggestions about something else I may want to do at this point? make another copy of recovery cd? will this cd work to recover to another computer should i need to do that?

thanks again.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

You could store a copy of the winre.wim file on another drive somewhere -- just as a backup in case anything happens to the one in the WinRE_Backup folder.

You can run MakeDisk again to create another TBWinRE CD if you want. Note that if your system supports booting from flash drives you may prefer creating a UFD instead.

It will work on most computers. There could be issues on some systems, like if you need to add USB 3.0 drivers, RAID drivers, etc.

[squish]

excellent. thanks for the advice.

btw: since we expected to find winre.wim in c:\recovery, should I move it there, in case windows needs it? or will rollback mess with it, if i reinstall rollback sometime, eg: creating a new baseline snapshot.

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

I haven't used Rollback RX, but my understanding is that it disables WinRE. If correct I don't see the point of putting the file back.

[rich071]

Squish,

Did you try to install Rollback Rx with BootitBM installed? If you haven't I would suggest don't. I tried a few months ago, and to save any possible headaches, I installed BootitBM in a VMware VM with 3 Window XP installs. I installed Rollback into each partition. To match my configuration, I set it with EMBR enabled. It was disastrous to say the least. Supposedly, it works with other dual boot systems.

I never tried it with EMBR turned off, which for me is not an option. Rollback saves the snapshots to unused sectors on the hard drive. That is one of the reasons for testing in a VM. Also, according to users in their forum, the snapshots will eatup your disk space very quickly.

If anyone wants more details, I would have to go back and look at the setup again. I still have the VMware configuration. It may work with EMBR turned off, but I would be very cautious, if you try it. I know their users have had success in backing up the hard drive with Image for Windows, which backs up the snapshots in the unused space. If my memory serves correctly, it is because of the Phylock. Other image backup programs skipped backing up the snapshots. Users were upset after finding out the snapshots were gone after restoring.

I would like to hear any experiences from anyone else that tried Rollback Rx with BootitBM. I have no intentions in trying the software again. If I did, it would definately not be a multiboot or dual system.

Thanks,

[rich071]

Never fails, it seems like I missed a couple of other gotcha's. After installation, you have to activate the software. I have no issues with software activations unless it interferes with day to day operations of the software.

Their support suggests that you uninstall Rollback to do hard drive maintenance, which includes performing a defrag of the hard drive. Then reinstall and you have to go through the activation again. If you run out of activations, you have to place a support call to fix the issue. This may be resolved now, but it was a big issue on their forum when I was testing.

Later,

[squish]

rich701, I don't know what Bootitbm or embr is. I haven't installed rollback with booitbm .

As for rollback and defrag, they do include a defrag function now, though it seems that the ntsb system is doing its own defrag. and yes, rollback does eat up disk space. I monthly delete some snapshots and defrag from within rollback.