Recovery Media

Recovery Media is a standalone, bootable operating system. It lets you boot a device into a recovery operating system to run the Magnus Box Backup application and connect to your Magnus Box server over the network, so you can replace the device's primary operating system during a Disk Image restore.

Magnus Box includes a built-in feature to create custom recovery media on a removable USB flash drive, an external USB hard drive, or an ISO file, via the Create Recovery Media menu option. The following options are available.

WinRE

WinRE is the default option for creating Recovery Media within the Magnus Box desktop app. It can be created either on a physical USB drive or as an ISO file.

System requirements. This option is only available if the Magnus Box Backup device is running Windows, and it requires that Windows Recovery Environment is installed and available on your PC. If it is not installed, you may be able to install it via the reagentc /info command.

Create as USB. This creates a minimal USB Recovery Media based on the Windows Recovery Environment. It is recommended when restoring a physical PC. It requires a removable USB drive of at least 2GB and up to 32GB. Size requirements may be larger if additional drivers are installed into the image. External USB hard drives are not widely compatible with this option, though they may boot correctly depending on your hardware. Check the Show all drives checkbox to show available external USB hard drives.

Create as ISO. This creates a minimal ISO image file based on the Windows Recovery Environment. It is recommended when booting the ISO in a virtual environment or a cloud VM.

Configuration. On most common hardware, WinRE boots in a basic way without additional drivers. Adding drivers to the generated media may be necessary for some hardware and can improve your experience. You can choose whether the current OS drivers are copied into the recovery media; this feature extracts in-use third-party drivers from the current OS using the dism /export-driver technology. The exact drivers depend on your running OS and mostly include OEM drivers of any type (chipset, network, graphics, audio, usb, pcie, storage). There are no guarantees about what is added, but it should generally help ensure you can use the device.

Optionally, you can slipstream additional drivers and programs into the image:

Add drivers in *.inf file format. When choosing this option, the app opens a file picker to C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\, which contains most currently-installed driver packages on the PC.
Add custom files and folders. These are copied to the media under the virtual X:\custom\ directory.
Add a custom command to run during startup. For example, to run a driver installer that was only available as a custom exe, use the form X:\custom\my-installer.exe.

After generating the recovery media, the most recent successful settings are preserved in the Windows registry for next time.

Booting WinRE

Magnus Box generates the recovery media using parts of your installed operating system, so no additional download is required to create the drive.

The generated media preserves the custom branding of the installed Magnus Box application.
It impersonates your own Device ID and, if booted on the same physical hardware, will appear to Magnus Box as the same device.
It will be either x86_32 only or x86_64 only, depending on your installed Windows OS version.

The generated media uses a hybrid MBR/EFI boot and should boot correctly on both MBR and UEFI PCs. It uses the Microsoft ntldr bootloader and should boot correctly on UEFI PCs requiring Secure Boot. If you experience issues, you can try temporarily disabling Secure Boot from your UEFI firmware menu. There may be a black screen for a minute while the recovery OS is decompressed into memory.

The generated media is not compatible with Ventoy's default boot options. If you use Ventoy, open the ExMenu and choose the advanced WIMBoot boot mode for best compatibility.

Using WinRE

When booting the generated WinRE-based media, the Magnus Box desktop app appears directly, and you can use it to restore data. The Tools menu at the top of the screen provides some utilities: Command Prompt, Task Manager, Web Browser, and Timezone. The Timezone option opens a wizard to reset the configured timezone and the current date and time; a device out-of-sync with internet time may have difficulty backing up to some cloud storage providers.

After completing your restore, use Tools > Shutdown to exit the WinRE environment. The Shutdown menu lets you shut down or restart the device, or exit to the Microsoft Windows Recovery Environment, where you can perform other pre-boot tasks (for example boot repair or Command Prompt access) before rebooting the PC normally.

WinRE limitations

Some features are currently unavailable from inside the created WinRE environment.

Wifi support may or may not be available inside WinRE. One workaround is to connect via wired Ethernet. Another is to configure Wifi manually:

Find the driver for your Wifi adapter: open Device Manager (devmgmt.msc), find your adapter under Network Adapters, right-click and choose Properties, and on the Driver tab click Driver Details and note the filenames ending in *.sys.
In the Recovery Media wizard, choose add custom driver, find the folder with the same name as the *.sys driver, and choose its *.inf file, then generate the media.
Boot the media and open a Command Prompt. Start the Wifi subsystem with net start wlansvc, confirm the interface appears in netsh wlan show interfaces, then browse and connect with netsh wlan show networks.

Missing features:

VSS for backup operations. Workaround: it should not be necessary to use VSS for backup operations from inside the WinRE boot environment.
The Windows Disk Management GUI. Workaround: use diskpart commands.

Drive letters may differ. In the recovery environment, hard drives are enumerated as-found. If a Local Path Storage Vault was used for backups, the drive letters may not match the original Windows system and may need to be set explicitly:

Boot into the recovery media and open a command line via Tools > Command Prompt.
Type DISKPART, then LIST VOLUME to show all volumes and their drive letters.
Identify the volume to reassign (for example volume 5), type SELECT VOLUME 5, then ASSIGN LETTER=F, and LIST VOLUME to verify.

Using UNC paths for Storage Vault locations, rather than drive letters, normally avoids this issue.

Version compatibility. The resulting WinRE USB drive is based on your PC's version of WinRE, which Microsoft provides and updates with a kernel specific to the latest feature upgrade (for example 1903, 1909, 2004). For best results with the "fix Windows boot problems" feature after a full disk restore, avoid using an old USB Recovery Media drive for a newer version of Windows.

Legal notice. The resulting WinRE image contains components of the Microsoft Windows operating system that can only be used under the terms of your Windows license.

Windows To Go

Windows To Go is an alternative option for creating USB Recovery Media within the Magnus Box Backup application. It creates a full Windows boot environment and requires an external hard drive of at least 32GB.

System requirements. This option requires the Portable Workspace Creator (pwcreator.exe) to be installed and available on your PC. This tool is included with Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8.1 Pro, and Windows 10 Pro, but was removed in Windows 10 update 2004.

Using Windows To Go. No customizations are applied to the generated boot drive. Boot into the drive, install Magnus Box normally, and use it to perform recovery operations such as restoring data.

Linux

This feature requires Magnus Box 24.6.6 or later. The "Linux ISO" option creates a standalone recovery media as an ISO file.

System requirements. This option is available if the Magnus Box Backup device is running either Windows or Linux. Magnus Box uses a container to build the recovery media, so the PC must have one of the following containerization systems available:

Docker (default on Windows)
Podman (available in recent Magnus Box versions)
Chroot (default on Linux, available in recent Magnus Box versions)

If you are using Docker, any Docker distribution can be used, including Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, the docker.io Debian/Ubuntu package, or Podman installed with Docker compatibility. On a Windows host, Docker requires hardware virtualization features to be available on the device. These are enabled by default in the firmware for all PCs shipped with Windows 11 or later; older PCs may require manually enabling virtualization in the firmware (BIOS/EFI).

Configuration. You can choose whether the recovery environment includes a web browser (a recent ESR version of Firefox) and whether it includes additional drivers (the linux-firmware-nonfree package, recommended for best network, wifi, and graphics support, at the cost of a larger ISO). You can also choose the Linux distribution used as the base environment:

"System default" is recommended. At the time of writing this corresponds to Debian 12, but may change in future versions.
Debian 12 "Bookworm" is recommended for best hardware compatibility.
Debian 11 "Bullseye" is a legacy option that produces a smaller ISO.

Depending on your options, the resulting ISO ranges from roughly 300MB to 700MB. It is fully branded according to the current user-interface branding of your Magnus Box server, which affects the generated filename, the labeled boot options, the image assets, and the branding of the Magnus Box software inside the recovery environment.

Booting the Linux ISO. The ISO can be booted directly in a virtual environment. To create a bootable USB drive for physical hardware, image the drive directly with Rufus, dd, or a similar program. The Linux ISO is not compatible with Ventoy (you may see "Unable to find a medium containing a live file system"). The image supports both BIOS and UEFI boot modes and the bootloader menu indicates which is in use. It does not support UEFI Secure Boot. At boot, the menu offers a normal boot or a nomodeset boot; the default works in most cases, but if you see no graphics after booting (for example (EE) Fatal server error), reboot and try the other nomodeset option.

Using the Linux recovery environment. The Magnus Box desktop app appears directly and can be used to restore data. The device connects automatically to an ethernet network using DHCP; Wifi is available on supported hardware and can be configured from the Network Manager menu. The recovery media is a single-user OS running as root. Additional Debian programs are available via apt: open a terminal and type apt install program_name.

Limitations. If you switch a PC between Windows and Linux, the system time may appear to differ, since the hardware clock is used for local time (Windows) or UTC (Linux). You may need to change the system time before accessing TLS servers.

Legal notice. The chosen base Linux distribution is licensed to you under various open source terms, including the GNU General Public License (GPL). The Magnus Box Backup software includes proprietary code to generate a Linux-based recovery media. Magnus Box LLC does not redistribute the base Linux distribution itself, and is therefore not subject to the GPL's source code redistribution clause.

Other boot environment

You may also create a recovery environment in any other way. Either Windows or Linux can be used. Some possible methods include creating a Linux bootable USB drive, using a third-party tool like Rufus to create a Windows To Go drive, or using recovery media from your PC OEM vendor (for example Lenovo, Dell, HP). In these cases you will need to manually launch the Magnus Box Backup app once booted into the recovery environment.