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Situation with death in the family. Please help getting computer back online.

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Hi. I just took on trying to get my recently deceased uncle's computer up and running, so his kids can use it. There seems to be no hardware issues, however, there is software issues. The system has 2 separate hard drives. One has WindowsXP Home, and the second is a storage drive that contains a backup archive made with True Image.

I can not boot up the computer, and I do not have posession of the WinXP Home disk to run the repair console. It is a licensed WinXP Home install.

By running the Windows drive through an external subsytem, I was able to access all files on the drive. I have come to learn that the version of Acronis Trueimage is version 13.0.0.5055.

My problem is, there is no way to find out if my uncle registered his software. This is a big problem because to download the Boot Media ISO, the software needs to be registered.

My goal is to hopefully get this system back up and running, via the backup sitting on the drive.

Can anybody help me????

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According to this chart the Trial version of ATIH2014 should be useable to perform a recovery:

http://kb.acronis.com/content/2768

I'd assume that use of the demo version would require that you install it first and then make a Bootable Media, which seems a lot of trouble to go through so maybe someone else here has a better idea about this.

Hello,
Sorry about your loss. First, I'm not an expert but have an idea. If you have access to a working computer then you can download a trial version of TI 2014 (guessing it should work for a 2103 back-up) or maybe 2013 also, from the Acronis web-site. That can be used to create a recovery disk that could be used to boot the computer in trouble and use the back-up image to restore the computer, if the back-up is OK. Go here and select "try now."
http://www.acronis.com/products/tryorbuy.html#close

If that's not good, I would be happy to mail you a recovery disk tomorrow, if you felt comfortable posting a mailing address on the forum, but posting an address probably isn't a good idea. It might be prohibited also, but up to you.
Also, I would think that people more knowledgeable than I would have some other ideas.

The idea to use the trial verson Recovery CD is a good idea and the one to use. Thanks guys for the idea.

yes, A recovery CD of the trial version can be downloaded from the website WITHOUT the installation of the trial or the removal of the old version.

Sign with Acronis to try the trial version.
Register with Acronis the trial serial number provided by Acronis.
Once you have registered the trial serial number, then you have access to the trial version downloads and the ISO download is a separate download file.

Download the ISO file and burn as an image file onto a blank CD.

If using Windows 7. you can use the included Win7 burner and simply right click on the downloaded file and choose the "open with" as Windows Disk Image Burner.
If using XP, you will need to download a free program such as ImgBurn to burn the ISO as an image.

Once, the trial version CD has been created, it only function is to be used for restore purposes. It has no backup or clone capabilities within the trial CD.

The ability to use the create a trial version recovery CD (without installation of the full program) was introduced with the 2013 version after much effort and persuasion on the part of the volunteer MVP's.

Note link #9 below.

GroverH wrote:
Once you have registered the trial serial number, then you have access to the trial version downloads and the ISO download is a separate download file.

I didn't know this myself--good deal GroverH!

I do thank everybody for your help. Unfortunately, I had to give up on restoring the system due to a large amount of system problems. Thank you.

Any chance we might still be able to help you with your computer issues?