Post by Ken SpringerBefore I burn through a bunch of CDs...
Anyone know of a free backup software, that on the emergency boot disk,
there's an eject button?
The computer I'm working with now has a slot drive burner (like iMacs)
and no pin hole for ejecting the disk.
Without the eject button, no way to eject the boot disk so you can
recover your system from a set of DVD disks.
There may be a keyboard shortcut, but that's of no value to someone that
doesn't know the keyboard shortcut.
EaseUS and Aomei do not have the button.
OK, I got this working.
It turns out, that my Macrium 5.3 rescue CD
could not be ejected, because it wasn't RAM mounted.
I made a fresh CD (in VirtualBox as a test environment)
using Macrium version 6, and then I carried out a bcdenum check.
You extract the BCD file from the rescue.iso you make,
and you can "read out" the settings like this. Assuming
the BCD file is stored in your current working directory.
Using the /store option, allows working with a BCD which
is not the current boot OS BCD file. You can then probe
"foreign" BCD files.
bcdenum /store BCD /enum
And the output for the BCD on the Macrium 6 CD looks like this.
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier {bootmgr}
description Windows Boot Manager
locale en-US
inherit {globalsettings}
default {default}
displayorder {default}
toolsdisplayorder {memdiag}
timeout 30
Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier {default}
device ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
path \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe
description Windows Setup
locale en-US
inherit {bootloadersettings}
osdevice ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
systemroot \windows
custom:250000c2 1
detecthal Yes
winpe Yes
ems No
Since it contained the word "ramdisk", I figured the
CD gets copied into RAM. And it could be
ejected.
So I rebooted the VirtualBox machine, using the rescue.iso
as the boot source.
In Macrium, I pretended to "Browse" for a restore MRIMG file.
Instead, using the Explorer file navigation window, I located
the optical drive D: , right clicked it, and selected Eject.
It still didn't like it, but the virtual CD was ejected
in VirtualBox.
So it's worth a test with Macrium version 6.
*******
When you make a rescue CD on version 6, it installs
the drivers needed by that specific machine. Which
means the CD may not be "perfect for every machine"
and is effectively custom-made. This will complicate
the test procedure for your button-less optical
drive. Since your hard drive is still functional,
even if this test fails, you can simply refuse
to "Press any key" during the boot cycle, and
fall through to hard drive booting. That works
now, while you have a controlled test environment
with a working hard drive, but if your user had
no hard drive contents, then you'd be stuck.
So testing it now, you should be able to wiggle
your way out, if the burned CD doesn't work.
I used my Macrium install files I keep here for
version 6 experiments. The same set of files I
used to set up a virtual test environment for
someone else. I happened to choose WinPE5.zip during
download. But you can choose some other option
of the four versions available if you like.
This is a picture of the "change PE version" dialog.
Loading Image...The reason those options exist at all, is the rescue.iso
can be copied onto the C: drive of the system, as
an alternate boot OS. So you can boot from the hard
drive, and have a work environment independent of
your regular C: . So to match the OS the environment
is going into, you can select a WinPE version for
the machine. Now, such a boot option is nice, but
isn't of much usage during an emergency. That's when
you need the CD. And the version of WinPE used
for the CD boot, well, the version there helps
with hardware. For example, you would expect a
Win8.1 system to have built-in USB3 support. So
you would select a WinPE version number,
consistent with getting enough hardware support.
In any case, I have discovered by accident, that
Macrium 6 is RAMboot, and Macrium 5.3 was not. And
maybe that will be enough to give you a means to
eject the CD, using the Explorer file dialog that
is exposed when "browsing for a restore image".
In my VM, there wasn't a lot of visual feedback
that the CD eject had worked, until I tried
a second time and got an error :-) And then,
going to the VBox storage options, I could
see my CD was missing and it had worked.
And the environment was still running, without
the CD.
Some Microsoft page claims you need around 512MB
of RAM, for RAMboot WinPE. Just to give you some
idea of the hardware requirements. If the machine
in question only had a 128MB stick, you'd be out
of luck on this flavor of Macrium booting.
Paul