You must always use 32-bit drivers for WinPE-based media creation for the purpose of proper hardware recognition (WinPE media created this way will work correctly on 64-bit systems as well). However, for Acronis Universal Restore purposes you'll also need to specify 64-bit system drivers for the system to load correctly after the recovery.

This article applies to:

• Acronis Bootable Media based on WinPE

Description

While creating WinPE-based media with Acronis plug-in, you need to add drivers for specific hardware to make sure that WinPE media recognizes the hardware correctly. There are several important points to remember:

1. Bootable Media Builder supports only x86 WinPE 2.x or 3.0.

2. To recognize the hardware in pre-boot environment, Microsoft WinPE itself needs 32-bit drivers only, regardless of whether you are going to use it on a 32-bit or 64-bit system.

(!) If you load only 64-bit drivers into WinPE for hardware recognition purposes - it will not work correctly and may fail to detect the respective hardware.

3. However, if you are going to recover a system from the WinPE media using Acronis Universal Restore to a 64-bit system, you will need 64-bit drivers as well (in addition to 32-bit drivers).

More information

The best practice for WinPE is to always specify 32-bit drivers to be loaded into WinPE for hardware recognition and optionally (in addition to 32-bit drivers) specify 64-bit drivers for Acronis Universal Restore purposes. Alternatively just avoid using 64-bit drivers during WinPE creation completely and point to these drivers stored on a separate location (e.g. a Flash disk or a network share) only during Acronis Universal Restore.

See also Acronis Bootable Media Types.