Macrium Reflect creates custom Windows PE systems for each installation type by downloading the required components from Microsoft. Although, do not rely upon this local copy as a rescue mechanism because it could be lost if you suffered hard disk failure or corruption leaving you without a method for rescuing your system. For convenience or automated restores to your system disk, you can add Windows PE to a boot menu that’s displayed when your system first starts. You can boot your computer into Windows PE from a CD, DVD, USB stick or USB attached external hard disk. After you provide these additional drivers, Macrium Reflect adds them to the Windows PE environment. You can provide drivers by finding driver packages on the local hard drive, looking for driver CDs supplied with the system, or downloading drivers from the web. If it can’t find appropriate drivers, Macrium Reflect prompts you to provide drivers. When Macrium Reflect creates a rescue CD or USB, it analyses your system hardware and tries to locate drivers for unsupported devices by looking on your system. The default Windows PE environment supports a good selection of hardware, and you can add support for further devices. The Macrium Rescue Environment needs to include support for your hardware such as USB ports, network interfaces, and in particular for your storage device if, for example, you use RAID disks. You have the option of restoring to a new system or virtual machine using Macrium ReDeploy to reconfigure your Windows installation for the new hardware.

For Windows XP, Vista and systems without WinRE, Reflect will download the Windows Pre-installation directly from Microsoft. A variant of this to enable Windows system recovery is called the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) typically supplied with Windows 7 and later operating systems. This lightweight, non-persistent, version of Windows is called the Windows Preinstallation Environment (also known as Windows PE or WinPE). It contains a bootable, lightweight version of Windows and a full version of Macrium Reflect. This makes creating rescue media the first thing you need to do with Macrium Reflect. If you lose your Windows operating system or need to restore your system, you can start your PC using Macrium Reflect rescue media on CD, DVD, or USB stick.

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