Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware with Acronis Universal Restore

With Acronis Universal Restore you can recover the image of your system to a machine with dissimilar hardware

This article applies to:

Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack

Introduction

Acronis Universal Restore is a module that allows changing Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL.dll) and install mass storage boot device drivers into the system.

It installs boot device drivers (e.g. hard drive or RAID controller drivers) into the system during the recovery process, so that the operating system can boot from this boot device. If there are proper NIC drivers present in the folder with the drivers, Acronis Universal Restore will copy them into the restored system and will schedule their installation on Windows boot-up.

(!) All the other drivers (e.g. video and sound card drivers, plug and play drivers) are not installed by Acronis Universal Restore, as they can be installed in Windows after the successful migration.

Acronis Universal Restore is applicable for:

Instant recovery of a failed system on different hardware;
Migration to a machine with dissimilar hardware;
Real-to-virtual and virtual-to-real computer migration for system recovery, testing and other purposes.

Solution

Before restoring an image of your operating system, please ensure the following:

You have Acronis Bootable Media with Acronis Universal Restore. If you do not, please Install Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack. See Acronis True Image Home 2011: Installation of Acronis Plus Pack and Acronis True Image Home 2011: Creating Acronis Bootable Media;
You have created Acronis Bootable Media (standard, WinPE, or BartPE) after the installation of Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack;
You have a backup of a supported operating system. See Acronis Universal Restore of Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack: Supported Operating Systems;
You have drivers for the hard disk drive controller or chipset drivers for the new computer. 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, if you downloaded the drivers in *.exe, *.cab, *.zip format, you should extract them first. The driver files should have the *.inf, *.sys or *.oem extensions.

Restoring system backup with Acronis Universal Restore:

Boot from Acronis Bootable Media and select Acronis True Image Home (Full version):
On the Acronis True Image Home 2011 home screen, select Recover -> My Disks:
Select the backup of your system partition that you would like to restore (in *.tib or *.vhd format):

(!) Acronis Universal Restore is not available for Nonstop backup.
Select Recover whole disks and partitions and Use Acronis Universal Restore:
On the Drivers manager screen select where Acronis Universal Restore should look for the new drivers:

(!) Acronis Universal Restore patches the registry and installs the new drivers after the system is restored, so make sure the location with the drivers will still be available. For example, do not specify the search path for the drivers on the same disk to which you are restoring the backup. The recommendation is to have the drivers on a separate USB disk, or on a network share.
Select to restore the whole disk with the operating system (including MBR and Track 0):
The partition type should be Primary and Active:
Leave the Recover disk signature box unchecked if you are planning to keep both the old and the new hard disks in the machine. Enable the checkbox if you are planning to use only the new disk and would like to keep Windows Restore Points:
Review the Summary window and click Proceed to start the operation: