When universal restore FAILS, how I managed to get it to work
One solution of course is to go though making a bartpe version of the product. At the time I did not know about this. Universal restore was failing for me due to my sata controllers not being supported. I used an ingenius method to get it to work thought I would share the info. I converted the tib to VHD and did a universal restore to a virtual hard drive in a virtual pc environment. This will always work, no controller issues. Then I converted the image back to tib and did a normal restore to my real hardware. Boom fixed. By doing this I actually cloned a single disk to a raid zero setup.
Thought this was pretty cool and maybe could be of some help to someone else.
Cheers.
-duhmez
Dumez,
I have been attempting to convert a single disk to RAID 1 and came across your post which is very interesting. I have a Windows 2003 server running on a single bootable sata and have tried restoring my Acronis image using universal restore to a 2 disk hardware RAID 1 in an identical server I built for testing but when booting I keep getting a blue screen on boot even though I had the raid drivers available when I applied universal restore.
I have no experience yet with virtual pc environments. How did you go about converting your backup image to a virtual drive?
Thanks,
Dan
True Image suports converting to microsoft vhd natively. Think it was in the tool section of acronis. It also can convert back to tib in there. If you do it with what's called xp mode it wil force you to make it as a winxp machine but once it is setup you can goto its options and tell it to create a new virtual hard disk that has no data. You will do a universal restore from your tib to this virtual hard disk. You will not need any additional drivers to do this step. Then make sure the 2 disks are set to your mirror properly and enabled as such and active. Now your new vhd hard drive that u restored to is ready for the next step, turn off virtual pc and convert the vhd to acronis tib.
One important thing to know at this point. Could you install windows normally to this raid controller by default or is it 100% required to have your raid driver on hand to install windows fresh? If you can install fresh windows onto the raid without any additional drivers, then this method should work 100% of the time. Otherwise you would have to also supply the drivers for the raid controller for sure. Keep in touch here I'd like to know how it all goes.
The fact that you said the universal restore worked, but then gave you a blue screen seems od to me, unless you provided the wrong driver by accident. 64 bit vs 32 etc or something, or specified an upper folder and not he deep folder where the oem file is.
Word of warning, restoring to the VHD will take quite a while!
One more thing: I stored the original tib file on a network share, so once booted the virtual acronis environment could access the file.
Duhmez, thanks for the info. I tried doing a repair install just to see if Windows would load properly after being restored to the new raid 1 array I created but even though it accepted the drivers when I did the F6 during the install I still get a stop 0x0000007e when I reboot so I'm thinking there is some other issue I have to address first. I'm going to try a clean install onto the new raid array to see if that works before I go any further. If I can get a clean install to work then I will at least know that it isn't an issue with the sata raid drivers.
Duhmez -- sounded like an excellent solution to my problem but I have no experience with using Virtual Machines - I converted my .tib file as directed into a .vhd - this on a network share (home) - I downloaded the Virtual software from www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx - What I really need is XP Mode but only have Home Premium - I have Mike Halsey's book "Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out and followed the instructions to set up a Virtual Machine on my netbook - When I ran ATIH 2012 PP it just wiped out my W7 system with the .vhd and XP wouldn't boot (no drivers as usual) - Obviously, I don't know enough to do this without some specific instructions so if you could help it would be greatly appreciated - Thanks, John