On pages 318 to 319 of the 547 page tome of a User Guide are the Diskpart commands to prepare the raw flash drive. Full formatting takes close to 45 minutes. Quick format, as suggested by Macrium, would require less time.
A faster method is to use the MiniTool Partition Wizard, which will take a maximum of 8 seconds.
1. Highlight the flash drive & click "Initialize to MBR Disk"
2. Click "Apply".
3. Click "Yes".
]4. Click "OK".
5. Highlight the flash drive again & click "Create Partition".
6. Change the file system from NTFS to FAT32 & determine the size of the partition by moving the slider, click "OK", then click "Apply" & "OK" again.
7. You can also set up both the initialization & partition creation together & click "Apply" once. This will shave off 2 seconds.
Return to Macrium Reflect.
1. Select the medium & check "Multi Boot (MBR/UEFI)". Here is a good explanation why it's the file system, not the initialization, that matters. This feature will allow you to boot in both BIOS & UEFI devices.
2. The base WIM will be automatically selected for you. There's nothing for you to do.
3. Click "Build". The Rescue flash drive will be created in about 5 minutes.
The creation of a system image for a 320 GB HDD, with 28 GB used, required 12 minutes & 18 seconds. Restoration time for the same HDD was 10 minutes & 9 seconds.
There is a new wrinkle in 7.2. After locating a system image to restore & clicking "Restore this image" on the right, this screen appears:
If the restoration is done within Windows, this expected screen appears; but, of course, it will not work for a LM image.
One's heart skips a beat when clicking "Select Destination Disk" does absolutely nothing. The solution is to click the Source Disk in the upper half of the screen; then the partitions of the HDD will appear in the lower half (as they were populated automatically in the past).Macrium Reflect had been free in the past, then only the 30 day trial version was available. Both versions can be downloaded now. The present 30 day trial versions has a number of additional features that the average user will not need. Version 7.2 does not seem to have a right click menu to rename or delete a system image. With the much abbreviated time for Rescue medium creation & the free version, the lack of the right click menu is insignificant.
After converting an Acer Chromebook to a LM PC, curiosity was piqued by all the great press about GalliumOS. The GalliumOS Live USB is not gracious enough to allow an installation which saves 19.3 Mate. The "Something Else" option was unattractive, because GParted is unfamiliar. With a newly minted 19.3 system image, GalliumOS can be installed on the former Chromebook with much less trepidation. While GalliumOS may be zippier & the touchpad works right out of the box, but the graphic design does not dazzle. Aesthetics matter.
