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The moral of the story is that if I had created the WinPE rescue media on the actual hardware that I wanted to use the rescue media on then the .wim boot image would have had the exact and correct drivers. When I made the WinPE .wim boot image on another computer using differing hardware I ended up with a less than ideal situation.
One circumstance was going to take 44 hours to complete the restore while the other circumstance completed it in 11 minutes.
Info worth knowing??? :-)
Yup! Good to know. The school of life, huh?
I didn't notice anywhere that it said you must use a rescue disk created on specific hardware, but the description provided in the Macrium user guide implies that may be the best option...
What version of Windows PE should I choose?You should choose a version of Windows PE that can access your System drive and also your backup
location. The default option selects the Windows PE version that is the best match for your Windows
operating system. This enables the rescue media wizard to automatically copy any required drivers for
Network, USB or SATA controllers. However, versions of Windows PE that are more recent than your
Windows OS may already contain compatible drivers and also offer additional support for USB 3.0.
Windows PE (WinPE) is packaged with a large collection of drivers but there are many devices
that are not part of the WinPE driver package. If your device is not compatible then you must add
its driver so WinPE recognizes it and communicates with your device.
The wizard checks whether your device requires drivers adding to WinPE. It builds a list of devices in your
computer that are either Hard Drive/RAID controllers, Network Interface Cards, USB controllers or USB hubs.
For each of these devices it checks if:
The device is supported by default in WinPE
There is a compatible driver in the host operating system
There is a compatible driver already present in the collection of drivers on previously created rescue
media
Supported devices have a status of either:Device Support in WinPE
Compatible Device Support in WinPE
Copy Host Driver
Driver already present in Drivers folder
Even if a device is supported you can choose to update it and use a different driver, you do not need to use
the driver provided by WinPE. Being able to update drivers in this way is useful if you experiencing issues
with performing backups or restores in WinPE, for example, if restoring runs slowly from a USB device.
You can find driver install packages in several places. Most manufacturers create a driver folder on the hard
drive of a new PC, often named after the manufacturer. If this is not present, you can download drivers from
the device or PC vendor's website. For older PCs, manufacturers of devices and motherboards included
driver CDs in the packaging, however, these may not be the latest.
Click the 'Update Driver' button to search for a compatible driver.
This presents a wizard. This wizard is straightforward to use, the first page prompts you for a folder to scan
for drivers and whether you want to include all sub-folders.