Universal Restore Migration to new Lenovo T460s
I'm new to Acronis True Image nd bought the program in teh hopes of migrating all my progs& data from an older Dell laptop to anew Lenovo T460s. The Lenovo has 3 partitions a small EFI, the main NTFS C drive, and a small Recovery partition. The Dell only has 2 partittions (no EFI partition.) I tried recovering only the C drive, leaving teh Lenovo EFI and Recovery partittions intact. On suing teh Universal Recover boot it could not see an OS so I could not proceeed. Do I need to remove the EFI partittion on the Lenovo so teh partittion struction is teh same as the Dell?


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Thanks very much Steve for your indepth response.
I did set the Lenovo BIOS to Legacy and CSM on. I did restore all a partitions from the Dell to the Lenovo, but Universal Restore still couldn't see an OS. Out of curiosity I booted with a standard Windows 10 64b DVD and went into Repair mode but it was not able to attempt repair although going to Command Promptr I could see the C: drive and all it's files including the Windows folder.
Any further throughts? I'd hate to have to reinstall all my programs and reconfigure them. But maybe that's my only option now.
Fortunately I do have the Lenovo partittion table backup so I can restore back to original.
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Trevor, when you say that you restored all the partitions from the Dell, did you first remove the EFI & any other partitions from the Lenovo drive? Also did you match the SATA controller mode in the BIOS between the two laptops?
Another assumption, are these both 64-bit OS versions that are involved?
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I did not remove the EFI partition. The other 2 partitions were replaced with the Dell versions.
The Lenovo does not have a setting I could find for viewing/changing the SATA mode.
Both OS are 64bit.
I could remove the EFI partition if you think that's an issue. I own a bootable partition manager. If I remove the EFI partition should I leave it as unallocated?
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Trevor, you can try just removing the EFI partition but you will also need to restore the MBR from the Dell backup image as well as this is required to point to where the Windows / System Reserved partition is found.
Ideally, I would recommend wiping the Lenovo drive and restoring the whole Dell backup image including MBR and Track 0 data and let the restore process manage any updates needed to any partition references.
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I believe you'd need to remove the efi partition as the uefi bios, although set to allow legacy now, is probably picking up the old efi boot info from it.
not only that, but your disk needs to be formatted MBR to allow for legacy booting and it sounds like it's still GPT from the original os install.
If you have a good original drive image that you may want to restore to factory then you can do that down the road with that image. Moving forward, you'll need to wipe out the entire drive, initialize in mbr, and restore the entire drive from the legacy os image to simplify things.
ehat type of drive does the Lenovo have in it too? If it's pcie nvme then chances are it's set to RAID and that will likely cause issues for the restored OS as we'll but universal restore should help with tha, although you may need to have the IRST drivers ready to add with UR.
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I did wipe the EFI partition but Acronis would not let me restore the MBI &Track 0 - it greyed out the destination.
I can remove all the partitions from the Lenovo but the internal drive would still be formated GPT - not sure if that would be an issue.
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Thanks Bobbo_3COX1 for your input. Not sure how I could format the internal drive with MBR - it is currenrly GPT. Will Google that.
The internal drive is a standard Crucial M2 - not PCIE.
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Trevor.
From and elevated command prompt use diskpart clean to blow away all paritions on there and allow it to be re-initialized. You can reinitilize as MBR and then try again. Be advised that you do not want any important data on there as you should expect it to be lost doing this.
Diskpart <enter>
List disk <enter>
Select disk (X) <enter> - NOTE: replace X with the disk number that matches the one you want to format.
Clean <enter>
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Then go to control panel >>> administrative tools >>> computer management >>> storage - disk management
- find and select the disk, right-click and "initialize" as MBR. Then right-click the drive space and format as basic and NTFS.
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Bobbo_3COX1
As my new laptop won't boot to Windows I cannot follow your steps to use Windows DiskManager to format the internal HD.
As my old laptop was formatted MBR I am assuming the reason why the new system is not bootable after transfer is because the new drive is formatted GPT. So, as I understand it, I need to reformat the new system somehow as MBR BEFORE restoring from my backup of the old drive. Any guidance on thsi process would be much appreciated.
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Trevor, if you have created or can create the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media, then you can run the Diskpart commands advised by Bobbo after booting from that WinPE media.
See webpage: Configuring a Hard Drive with Diskpart and Windows PE or webpage: WinPE: Create USB Bootable drive which both show that this can be done outside of a working Windows OS using this WinPE media.
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