Recovering to different hardware

Using Acronis Universal Restore (provided by separately purchased Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack) will help you create a bootable system clone on different hardware. For more information see Acronis Universal Restore. Choose this option when recovering your system disk to a computer with a dissimilar processor, different motherboard or a different mass storage device than in the system you originally backed up. This may be useful, for example, after replacing a failed motherboard or when deciding to migrate the system from a desktop to a laptop.

Acronis Universal Restore is unavailable when recovering the system partition from an Acronis Nonstop Backup.

Before proceeding with recovery, make sure you have drivers for the hard disk drive controller or chipset drivers for the new motherboard. These drivers are critical for booting the operating system. You can download the drivers for your motherboard on the Vendor's web-site. Please note that if you downloaded the drivers in *.exe, *.cab, *.zip format, you should extract them first. The driver files should have *.inf, *.sys or *.oem extensions.

In most cases it is preferable to use your bootable media for system recovery. The rescue media must include Acronis Universal Restore add-on. Therefore, you need to re-create bootable media after installing the Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack.

1. Make your rescue media the first boot device in BIOS. See Arranging boot order in BIOS.
2. Boot from the rescue media and select Acronis True Image Home 2011 (Full version).
3. Click the My Disks link below Recover on the Welcome screen to start the Recovery Wizard. Then, choose the image of the system disk for recovery. Since drive letters in the standalone Acronis True Image Home 2011 may differ from the way Windows identifies drives, you may need to specify the path to the image file. Click Browse and select the disk and folder that stores the image.
4. Choose Recover whole disks and partitions and select the Use Acronis Universal Restore check box.

   

5. If the target hardware has a specific mass storage controller (such as an SCSI, RAID, or Fibre Channel adapter) for the hard disk(s), specify where to find the driver(s) for the specific hardware at the Drivers manager step. If the driver(s) is stored on a diskette or CD, select the Search removable media for device drivers box. If some drivers are stored on a local hard disk or a network share, select the Search for device drivers in the following locations box (when it is not selected by default). Specify the path to the driver(s) after clicking Add Search Path.

   

   When both boxes are selected at this step, Acronis Universal Restore will use three sources for drivers:

   - the removable media;

   - the drivers storage folder(s) specified at this step; and

   - the Windows default driver storage folders (in the image being recovered).

   The program will find the most suitable of all available drivers and install them into the recovered system.

6. Select the system disk at the What to recover step. Then, specify the destination of the disk being recovered (new system disk). At this point the program checks whether the destination disk is free. If not, you will be prompted by the Conformation window stating that the destination disk contains partitions, perhaps with useful data. To confirm deletion of the partitions, click OK.
7. Carefully read the summary of operations at the Finish step. If you do not want to validate the backup, click Proceed. Otherwise click Options on the sidebar and select the Validate backup archive before recovery box before clicking Proceed.

If the capacities of the source (backed up) disk and the destination disk are different, the new disk space will be proportionally distributed between the recovered partitions.

After successfully recovering the system partition, exit Acronis True Image Home 2011. Enter the BIOS, make the system hard disk the first boot device, and boot to the recovered Windows.