ATIM 2010/Win7 - can't restore full backup

I have a ThinkPad T420 that came with one of the dreaded Intel 320 series SSDs (with the 8MB firmware bug). I found out about this ticking time bomb when it went off. I lost everything.

I replaced the SSD with a regular HDD (never again will I use an SSD as the main drive on a work computer) and tried to restore the full backup I'd done with ATIH 2010. I've now been trying for a week, without success.

This is the second time I've had a catastrophic drive failure, with a backup from Acronis that I could not access and/or restore. The backup portion of the ATIH is relatively bug-free, but the restore part - the part that's most critical - is utterly unreliable, and does not work more often than it does.

Here's the latest saga...

1. I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 on my new hard drive, using GPT because it's more reliable. I tried to run the restore. I got a message that I needed the Plus Pack for GPT support. I looked for it, and discovered that the Plus Pack for 2010 is no longer available for sale anywhere. While looking for it, I got a virus on my tablet that took me 2 hours to clean off.

2. I deleted all the partitions in the new hard drive, ran "clean all" (took hours), converted to MBR (against my wishes), and again ran Acronis to restore the full backup. After the reboot, Acronis told me it couldn't find a hard disk, and aborted the restore.

3. I spent an hour or two researching this new problem, and discovered it was a known bug in older versions of ATIH 2010. I updated my copy to the last release, created an updated bootable CD (just in case), and tried again. This time, after it rebooted my computer, ATIH said that the path to the backup did not exist (the backup is stored on an external hard drive connected through USB). It didn't let me browse for the archive. I had two choices: Retry or Cancel the entire restore (dreadful design).

4. Since I wasn't getting anywhere with the Windows software, I thought I'd try the bootable disk. But it gave an error on boot (something about not being about to find "st" - it flashed by too fast to read), and then told me I had no hard disk. I recreated the bootable disk a few times with different parameters (e.g. go through the BIOS). None of these helped.

5. I spent another hour or two researching why ATIH was not recognizing the USB-connected external hard drive. Again, I discovered it was a known problem that many people shared - but not so easily solved. I saw an article that suggested not plugging in USB drives until after boot up. That's tricky advice since the full restore process does a reboot that you cannot interrupt or the process is cancelled. Also, since you can't NOT initially select the file to restore, the process has to start with the USB drive plugged in. So I didn't really see how this could work. But I thought I'd try.

6. I shut down the computer, took out the bootable CD, and rebooted into Windows. I got an error message when Windows tried to load the driver for the USB-connected external hard drive - it wouldn't connect. I spent an hour or two researching that problem on the internet. Again, a known Acronis bug with no easy solution. It was reported in ATIH 2010, and I've also seen it reported in later versions of the software.

Does anyone have any ideas for how I can solve these problems and restore this backup? How can I restore Windows' ability to see my USB drive?

Just please don't tell me to upgrade to Acronis 2013. I don't think it will help. And also, I should not have to pay additional to recover a backup archive. I paid for that when I purchased ATIH 2010.

Also, does anyone have a copy of the Plus Pack for ATIH 2010? It's not sold anywhere anymore.

Thanks.