How do I back up a machine that won't boot?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom
here for Ask Leo.com. It's a question I've gotten from time to time.
If you have a machine that has a problem
with Windows, we're not talking necessarily about hardware issues here.
We're talking specifically about issues
that prevent Windows from loading or maybe a hard disk issue, but something that only
affects the hard disk and not the entire system.
How do you back that up?
I really want you to back it up before you do things like replace the hard disk or
reinstall Windows from scratch so that you make sure not to lose anything.
But if the machine won't boot, how do you install the backup software?
How do you use the backup software to create that backup image?
Well, there's a technique,
and I've used it frequently, and I'm going to show it to you now.
So here we are in windows eleven.
This is a working machine.
If you've got a machine that isn't working, you can't boot this step.
This first step happens on a different machine.
What we're going to do is fire up our
backup software, in my case, Macrium Reflect Free Edition.
And what we're going to do is under other tasks, create rescue media.
Now, we often think of rescue media as
being used to rescue, to do things like restore a backup image.
As we'll see in a moment, it's good for much, much more than that.
In my case, I'm going to create an ISO file.
I'll go ahead and get that started.
In this case, since I am using Macrium Reflect Free,
I have to once again confirm that what I'm about to do is not for commercial use.
And off it goes while that's happening,
the thing is that if your machine can't boot into Windows or there's a problem
with a hard drive preventing it from booting, if you can still boot
from something else, be it a USB stick or a CD or DVD,
then you've got an opportunity to run your backup software.
The rescue disk that we're creating right
now actually contains a version of Macrium Reflect.
It will default to being set up for recovery for restoring a backup image.
But in reality,
what we'll find is that once we boot into it, we can also back up.
We'll let that ISO complete.
For me, what you would do then, after you've finished creating the rescue
media is you would take that rescue media to the machine that is having problems
booting, and you would boot from that rescue media.
So in my case, I now have an ISO file here.
That is something that I would if this were my situation, I would take this ISO
file, Macrium Reflect, and burn it to a DVD or a CD.
If you have a USB option to create, when you create Macrium Reflect rescue
media, you might create it directly to a USB stick.
That's great.
What matters most here is that you're
creating something that your problematic machine can then boot from.
And now we're rebooting this time from a CD.
Now, you'll notice that I had to press a key to make that happen.
That's fine, depending on what kind
of a machine you have and how it's configured to boot from something other
than the internal hard drive, you may see something similar.
But we've booted from this image, this rescue image.
And what you're looking at is, in fact,
Macrium Reflect version eight, the rescue CD.
And it's defaulted to the screen one would use when attempting to restore an image.
But we don't need to use that screen.
You can see here there is this other tab called Create Backups.
That's the one we care about.
We can see that there are a number of disks connected to this machine.
That top one disk.
One is the system drive.
Even if we had not been able to boot
from that drive for whatever reason, because we were able to boot
from the Rescue Media image, we can now back that up.
I'm going to do what we normally do image selected disks.
On this computer, we'll be given an option of which disk we want to back up.
I'm going to uncheck the second disk
because that's where we're going to place the image.
That second disk is the equivalent
of an external hard drive to which one would back up the destination.
I'm going to click on the folder icon here
so that we can make sure to select the correct external drive.
In this case, that's the Faux USB external drive, my D drive.
Now I'm going to hit next.
It's a summary of what we're about to do.
I'm going to click on Finish and the backup proceeds.
So I want to reiterate what's happening here.
We've not been able to boot this system for whatever reason.
Like I said, maybe Windows is corrupt, maybe the hard disk is having some issues.
But we were able to boot it from something else.
And that something else is the Macrium Reflect Rescue media.
Because we can do that.
It boots directly into a copy of Macrium Reflect that we can then use
to create a backup image of the drive that we were unable to boot from.
It really is that simple.
Once this backup completes,
we then have the freedom to do whatever we want with that hard disk.
We can reformat it.
We could reinstall windows.
We could replace it if need be because we
understand there might be a physical issue with the hard disk.
Regardless, the point is, by finishing this backup,
by taking this back up, even though the machine was unable to boot
from the hard disk, we've saved everything on the hard disk.
So we're not going to lose any data.
Even if we now turn around and replace
that hard disk or erase that hard disk and reinstall windows from scratch.
That's the concept.
That's pretty easy, and it's a very,
very useful technique if you ever find yourself in this situation,
this backup obviously is going to take a little while to complete.
Not going to make you sit through that.
There really isn't any point.
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I'm Leo. Notenboom.
This is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.