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Macrium not showing an external drive when I look to restore an image

I have a laptop with one internal drive, and i've connected two drives connected externally, to USB. One external drive, a Toshiba, has an image file. And the other drive is a Crucial SSD drive, it's built as an internal drive, but i've used a SATA-USB adaptor to connect it to USB. The make of the SATA-USB adaptor is "Sabrent", and the drive shows in Macrium as "Sabrent"! And the third drive involved is the internal one that is inside the laptop, a Samsung SSD.

enter image description here

The I wrote a box around, is the drive I want to write an image to. That's the Crucial drive(showing as Sabrent!).

The drive below it, a Toshiba, is the drive that has the macrium reflect image file.

Initially the Crucial drive (the one showing as "Sabrent"), was without any partitions and not set with any partition style so not MBR or GPT. But since I was having an issue, as I will describe, so I created a volume, so a partition and formatted, and gave it a drive letter too. Though it didn't make any difference as I will describe. I would expect the image to wipe over whatever is on there anyway.

Here is what Macrium shows for the Restore tab

enter image description here

Notice that it doesn't show any external drives.

I understand it not showing the Toshiba as that's the drive that contains the macrium image file.

But I expected it to show the Crucial external drive, and the Crucial external drive is the one I want to write to.

Unfortunately it's only showing the internal drive inside the laptop, as an option for me to write to.

I could get around this while still using Macrium. I could create rescue media, and boot off that and read the image off the external drive, and get the Crucial drive put in internally, and then write to that.

But I was expecting that Macrium could write to an external hard drive that is connected to USB. But it only seems to be showing the internal drive that is connected internally. i.e. the Samsung SSD that is in there.

Is there a way to get Macrium to show it, or is there a limitation with Macrium that it can only write to a drive that is plugged in internally?

The OS is Win7, and the Version of Macrium Reflect is 7.2

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  • Do you remember whether, after creating the volume on the external drive, you closed and reopened Macrium Reflect? I think I just saw the case where where the drives shown on the "Local Disks" tab remained out-of-date until restarting Macrium Reflect.
    – alx9r
    Commented May 29, 2023 at 21:42
  • @alx9r what.. there is no tab called "local disks" , and nothing in the question says that "local disks" aren't showing up. And the "create a backup" tab shows all disks, internal and connected. The "create a backup" tab, shows all disks. So if macrium isn't restoring onto an external drive(which it showed in another tab), it's not because it hasn't detected the external drive.
    – barlop
    Commented May 30, 2023 at 2:47
  • And the "create a backup" tab shows all disks, internal and connected. - Yep. I overlooked that, so out-of-date disk detection doesn’t explain it.
    – alx9r
    Commented May 30, 2023 at 18:05
  • it's detecting disks fine, is what i'm saying, it's not that it can't detect a disk. And look why don't you try what i'm trying maybe you'll find it won't let you restore to an external USB either
    – barlop
    Commented May 30, 2023 at 21:03
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    "And look why don't you try what i'm trying maybe you'll find it won't let you restore to an external USB either" - That is what I am working towards. There are still a few prerequisites I'm getting in place before my setup is comparable to yours.
    – alx9r
    Commented May 31, 2023 at 17:20

3 Answers 3

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In the end I succeeded completing a similar operation on my system. I think the restore location is offered in a different window from where you were looking here:

Here is what Macrium shows for the Restore tab

image

Notice that it doesn't show any external drives.

In my case, Macrium 8 shows a similar screen to your Macrium 7 also with drives missing:

enter image description here

That windows seems to show only drives for which Macrium has captured images on-hand.

After clicking "Restore" ("Restore Image" in Macrium 7) and "Select a disk to restore to..." I indeed see the external drive (the WD_Black, in my case) offered as a target:

enter image description here

Selecting the WD_Black and completing the wizard resulted in a successful restore.

I don't have Macrium 7 to confirm, but the Macrium 7 manual shows the same "Drag Partitions..." window with the "Select a different target disk" link as I see in Macrium 8. I wonder if your Crucial drive would have been offered from that Window in your case.

But I was expecting that Macrium could write to an external hard drive that is connected to USB.

I would expect this too. I'm not sure I have much use for an imaging tool that can't do that.

...is there a limitation with Macrium that it can only write to a drive that is plugged in internally?

I don't think this is a limitation of Macrium. At least it's not a limitation of Macrium 8 on my Ivy Bridge computer running Windows 10 using the Orico M214-U4 enclosure.

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    Yes that did it, thanks! From the restore tab. Clicking "restore image",(And it still only shows the internal disk, like you say), then "Select a different target disk". and that brings up that kind of hovering window like you show, with more disks. And I can choose the one I want and then it shows it'll restore to that one. What an uncharacteristically terrible aspect to the GUI though!!
    – barlop
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 0:13
  • You're welcome. I'm glad that explains it. Indeed I had to spend longer than I expected to understand how the different parts of the UI relate. Now that I understand it, I'm not sure how it could be improved upon. Macrium has to represent a more diverse set of objects than other imaging tools I have used. It's more capable than the others I have used, but at the cost of being less intuitive at first.
    – alx9r
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 0:21
  • well if you can't see how that GUI could be improved in that aspect, then hopefully you aren't the go to guy for GUI designs! If a system has less than multiple disks, even, less than 5 disks, it shouldn't be a problem to have a window that lists them all without leaving the user wondering why it is not listing them all.
    – barlop
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 10:04
  • Hmm…what do you think the drives shown on the “Image Restore” tab represent? I thought they represent drives captured in images Macrium has on hand. That fits with my observations, but I haven’t seen it called out in the documentation.
    – alx9r
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 14:47
  • I don't know how it is picking what subset it shows there, eg is it just internal drives, or the drives it thinks the image was made from, i'd just ignore them / take that list with a pinch of salt, it's probably better to not know that kind of nonsense!
    – barlop
    Commented Jun 1, 2023 at 16:18
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"Restore" means to write the image back to the same partition/filesystem that was the source of the image. In your case, it appears that is your "C:" drive, and you can't do that unless you are booted into the Macrium rescue PE environment. That's why your C: drive is shown in red. Writing the image to a different partition is called "Re-deploying". You would find that option (Redeploy to Different Hardware) in the Restore options of Macrium, if you are running a version that has that capability (the free version does not).

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  • And the free version of Macrium Reflect is end-of-life and no more security patches, updates, etc, will be provided after 1st January 2024.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 10:12
  • The hardware(you mean motherboard chipset) is the same. It's just one laptop to another identical model one. Or a newer hard drive in the same laptop, replacing the hard drive in there). I guess I could look at a clone option. The image is of a whole hard disk(so two partitions).. Though what you said re "redeploy" probably still applies
    – barlop
    Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 14:12
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    This is not what I expect based on the section "Restoring an image from within Windows" of the manual. That section states "...it's also possible to select a different target disk..." The advanced options even include an option named "Master Boot Record" which suggests to me that a disk image of one bootable system drive should be able to be "Restored" to another drive and be bootable.
    – alx9r
    Commented May 24, 2023 at 21:26
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    @alx9r Yeah, the idea this answer claims, that you can't restore to a different disk or that if you do then it's not called restore but something else, is wrong. The "redeploy" that he mentions is to do with having different hardware reflect.macrium.com/help/v5/How_to/Redeploy/… and not relevant to this case. As for the issue my Q describes, it might be a limitation that Macrium(And maybe some others?) have re restoring to an external USB drive. I think what I did was I plugged the drive in internally and restored the image onti it that way.
    – barlop
    Commented May 26, 2023 at 11:54
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From my experience, the "Select a different target disk" didn't show my external drive. I need to go out and click 'Refresh' button on the restore page, before going to 'Restore image'.

enter image description here

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  • is yours not even showing internal disks until you click refresh?
    – barlop
    Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 21:35
  • No. It did show internal disks before I refreshed. It even showed internal + external disks when I chose "Browse for an image file...". It just didn't show the external disk when I chose "Select a different target disk".
    – len
    Commented Oct 12, 2023 at 1:28
  • so when it showed only internal disks, then if you clicked browse does it not show any external drive, then you cancel that, and click refresh, then click browse again, and then it does show external drives?
    – barlop
    Commented Oct 12, 2023 at 17:57
  • Yes, if your "browse" mean ""Select a different target disk".
    – len
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 2:10
  • I had meant "browse for an image file" but I see what you are saying.. Macrium can see all drives in the browse for an image file screen. But the "image restore" tab has its own refresh that affects the window that appears when clicking "restore". The window that comes when clicking restore, has a "select a different target disk" link/button, but in your case you didn't need it and clicking that wouldn't show it but anyhow it showed in the window that came after clicking restore. Okay that's crazy stuff... your answer is useful and will apply for some people
    – barlop
    Commented Oct 14, 2023 at 3:28

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