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Fix Bootability with Acronis Universal Restore

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Hi forum,

 

after changing ONLY the CPU (Intel i5 --> i7), Windows 7 64bit does not boot anymore (hangs at the pulsating Win 7 logo which however stops pulsating after 5 seconds and sits there forever). Latest BIOS is installed.

 

Then I found this:

https://kb.acronis.com/content/21327 (Fix Bootability with Acronis Universal Restore).

I have the latest Acronis True Image 2016 and have created the recovery media on USB, including Universal Restore. However, there is no option to fix bootability like described in the above link.

 

Thanks heaps for help (this is urgent, it is a work related PC).

 

David.P
 

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David, if the system is not booting and the only thing that truly changed was the CPU and nothing else in the bios or OS, it is most likely do to incompatible drivers with the new chipset  that are stored in the current OS.  Most likely, it will become bootable once the drivers are generalized with universal restore if this is an accurate scenario.  Acronis does not have any tools that fix/repair bootloaders - that would need to be done with your Windows recovery/repair disk and BCD commands.  However, in this case, universal restore should be it.  If possible, I would take a full system backup image with your Acronis Bootable Recovery media first (just to be on the safe side), and then proceed running Universal restore without adding any drivers.  Hopefully, it will then boot and you'll just need to reinstall system drivers again from the manufacturer (download them ahead of time - at least the NIC so you can get online in case the default Windows drivers are too general for your particular system).  

Hello Bobbo and thank you for your informative reply.

What you’re saying is actually exactly what I ended up doing. I used the Universal Restore feature from the bootable USB media and made it generalize the broken Windows 7 install.

However Windows would still not boot. Instead it would sit there at the pulsating boot logo forever (which would have stopped pulsating by that time).

Additionally, I removed all add-on cards (graphics card, network card etc.) as well as all USB devices. I even removed all RAM modules but one, and tried booting with different RAM modules. I also did all the Windows boot recovery steps (that are available from the boot screen via F8) a couple of times.

However, even after the generalizing step, Windows still would not boot. Therefore I ended up reinstalling from scratch, which (looking back) has the advantage that this way, I not only got the first clean install after like 5 years but I also took it on me to move on to Windows 10.

Just out of curiosity, when doing the generalizing with Universal Restore, I was not prompted for any drivers. The same happened when I tried Universal Restore on another backup system partition which afterwards booted without problems and reinstalled all chipsets drivers.

So is it normal/intended behavior that Universal Restore would not prompt for drivers in this case -- I mean how would it know that the system would be booted on the same hardware afterwards?

Thank you again
David

Hi David, Universal Restore actually has no idea which hardware the OS is being booted from.  It will not prompt for specific drivers for the machine. It will generalize for you, and/or you can slip in drivers at the same time, but you have to pick them yourself.  Often times, the drivers you need to use, are only found when attempting to boot if you get a BSOD and a stop code that leads you to the needed driver on the new hardware.  In most cases, that is limited to RAID controllers or other storage devices only though.

For the most part, when the motherboard remains the same, I have not needed to use UR at all.  However, in the rare cases I have, I have only needed to run UR to generalize the drivers and then it boots after that. I don't use RAID in my personal builds, but if I did, I'm sure I'd need to supply the controller drivers when running UR as well. 

Not sure how long you waited with the pulsing, but it may have just needes some time to complete the first boot... or possibly, trying safe mode may have first allowed it to boot faster and then you could install drivers and try a regular boot after that.

Personally, I think you're better off when a fresh Win 10 install - it's a bit of a pain up front, but does help to have a happier and healthier system wihout old issues that may have come up over time and/or with other upgrades along the way.  I do fresh builds on new hardware everytime for this reason and only restore my data (documents, files, etc).   Once I have everything exactly the way I want, I then make my baseline image and test it by restoring to another drive (just to be sure).  When that's confirmed, I know that I have an image I can always revert to to start "fresh" wihout having to completely start from scratch again.