Can Universal Restore be used after I physically move a hard drive to new hardware?

Hi Troy,
When moving to a new hardware, you have to use Universal Restore to make your HD boot up.
You first make an image of your HD and then you restore it to the new hardware ,using Acronis UR, in both steps.

But my hard drive is almost full of compressed video and it's 2 TB (and compressed video doesn't compress very well). I don't know where I could back it up to. I don't have another 2 TB drive sitting around. I just want to physically move my hard drive. Since I can't backup/restore, I'm wondering if that takes any Acronis tool, including Universal Restore, out of the running as a possible solution to my problem.

Thanks,
Troy

Hi Troy,
I understand that you want to physically move your HD to another computer.You already said it in your 1st post.
To do so, you have to do what I said in my previous post. There's no other workaround that I know .
Just watch the forthcoming bargains and buy another 2 TB HD.

Hello all,

Thank you for posting. Babac, I appreciate your assistance!

Troy W,

Babac is correct, if you want to use the Acronis Universal Restore functionality to migrate to dissimilar hardware, you will need to create a backup and then restore the image using Acronis Universal Restore.

However, we can try assisting you in resolving the issue with your new hard drive not booting. Can you please provide us with additional information about it. Do you get any errors when the operating system fails to boot? Can you describe in more detail what steps you have taken.

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

Thanks to Babac and to Anton for your helpful information. Just to follow up, I found a solution:

On the old computer I used the "Disk Management" tools in Windows 7 to split the main hard drive into 2 partitions. I moved all my videos into the 2nd partition. Then I backed up the C: drive (much smaller now) using Acronis True Image Home. I tried to restore onto the new hardware using Backup and Recovery w/ Universal Restore. It gave me an error about a missing driver w/ the pci\ven_... id. I searched the internet for a few hours trying to find that driver. I eventually found one that seemed to be what I was looking for, put it on a usb drive (the unzipped *.inf file, etc.). I clicked "Retry" and it finished but said there were warnings. The computer still failed to boot. Using Safe Mode I could tell that it failed on CLASSPNP.SYS.

I eventually gave up and reinstalled Windows 7 from scratch and it works. Moving the videos to a 2nd partition gave me the freedom to do this, and within a few hours I had all my "tweaks" in place, and now I'm done.

I had used Backup and Recovery 10 w/ Universal Restore once before on a different system and it worked perfectly, so I'm not sure what's going on this time. So for me it has a 50% success rate.

--Troy

Hi Troy,
The most critical phase with Acronis UR is finding the right drivers.
Babac had a long discussion on that aspect with Acronis Support Team and suggested to use Double Driver to improve this research.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/9437
Since the suggestion was coming from an outsider, they replied that this could be a (good) workaround but that they were still recommending to manually find the drivers.Such a reasonning is hard to understand since Double Driver cannot make a mistake and pick the wrong drivers, as the detection is made directly from the actual drivers on the target computer.
Personnally ,my success rate is 100% with Double Driver.

Hello Troy and Romeo !

Thank you for your comments!

Troy, I sincerely regret that you had to reinstall your system, though I'm glad you have it finally up and running.

Should you decide to restore to another hardware once again, just keep in mind that you need the drivers from motherboard (chipset), RAID controller (if any) or other mass storage device. Please unpack them to be in *oem and *inf format and specify the path to that drivers during the restoration process. According to the information specified OS was suggesring from the lack of some chipset driver (hard to tell which exactly since we do not have the full name of the device).

Anyway it's nice to know that currently your machine is on and working. Should you have any additional questions or face any difficulties - let us know, we will surely be glad to help!

Romeo, thank you for sharing your opinion with us, we appreciate it.

I completely understand your point of view. Officially we really still advise that customers should obtain the drivers from the vendor due to we do not cooperate with Double Driver software and not responsible for its stability. Though we still consider it to be a good workaround.

Still it has certain limitations: one needs to have the exactly same OS installed on the target machine. Otherwise the drivers from it won't suit.
Thus this tool it useless in case
- you do not have any OS installed on the target machine
- you have another OS installed on the target machine
Extracting the drivers from the source machine won't suit as well since these drivers are from the old hardware and will be useless on the new machine.

Still we usually meet situations when customers are moving hard drives to the new hardware or have no OS installed on the target machine.

Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!

Thank you!

Hello Yana,
Using Double Driver, I have encountered an experience quite different from what you claim .
I just finished recovering an image created with UR on my Windows xp Pro laptop to my Windows xp Fam. PC and it went flawlessly.
On the other hand, I was unable to do it using the exact same OS , i.e., from Windows xp fam on my PC to another PC having the same Windows.

I just made another try from my laptop containing a dual boot ,Windows xp pro and Windows 7 pro.
I installed the UR image on a PC equipped with Windows xp Fam.
Here again using Double Driver and both systems were installed without any problem.

Hello Yana,
I would like to see your comments in regard to my last two posts.
A dialog is more interesting when there are two persons talking...

Hello Romeo,

Thank you for your posts. I apologize, but Yana is unavailable at the moment, if you do not mind I would like to continue where she left off.

It is very likely, for reasons unknown, I am afraid, because we do not support the Double Driver software, it was able to pick up the proper drivers from Windows XP pro which also worked on the Windows XP Home. It seems that it failed to do that from Windows Xp Home to transfer your image back to Windows XP Home. Have you tried restoring Windows XP Home without using Double Driver but simply using manufacturer's drivers?

I would really appreciate if you could get back to me in case you have additional questions.

Thank you.

Hello Anton,
Yes ,I tried to restore Windows xp pro sp3(computer #1) to another computer(computer # 2) with the same OS as computer # 1, using the manufacturer's drivers.It also failed.
On the other hand, I did it the other way around (from computer #2 to computer # 1) using Double Driver,and I succeeded.
P.S. Thank you for taking over.I just hope that you won't dissapear if I ever come up with different conclusions than yours...

Hello Romeo,

Thank you for replying.

When you write, the restore failed, did your newly restored computer come out with a BSOD message 0x0000007b or was it rebooting in a constant loop?

You are very welcome and please do not worry, this is an open forum community and we always welcome new ideas and suggestions.

Thank you for your feedback.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Hello Anton,
No ,I did not have any kind of these problems with any of these computers.

Anton ,
Are you going to come up with a solution???
Thanks.

Hello Romeo!

Thank you for your comments! I've been away for a while and glad to see that conversation didn't get stalled.

We appreciate you shared your experience with us, and we are very glad that Double Driver solution worked flawlessly for you.

I suppose I didn't made myself clear recently, and it aroused some questions, so  let me specify once again and try to make it as clear as possible for us to avoid further misunderstanding: 

We do not state that Double Driver will not work or that it's worse then obtaining the drivers from the vendor.

We do state that we're not responsible for that software and cannot guarantee it will work - because style and stability of Double Driver is a question for their developers and support. And since we cannot guarantee (since we are not developers of Double Driver program) that it is 100% reliable, we will not be able to advise it to our clients.

But you surely and absolutely can use the software, and we will be glad if it suits your needs. But in case it fails to work we will have to ask you to redownload the drivers from the vendor (see below, why).

It is up to customer to decide how to obtain the drivers. But in case a customer asks for our advise on how to obtain the drivers, we always suggest to contact the vendor, since at least in this case we can be sure that drivers, obtained from official developers, will suit the hardware you are restoring on.

Let me know in case there's something confusing again or whether this statement contradicts any previous statements of Acronis Support - we will investigate the issue closely.

We will surely be glad to provide you with the solution, but for it we need to know what exact issue you've faced. Could you please give us the details of what exactly is not working for you and exact sequence of steps performed before you have encountered the problem? Unfortunately we cannot heal the disease by trying to guess its nature.

Thank you once again for your comments, cooperation and understanding. We will be looking forward for your reply!

Yana. Thanks for explaning your position in regard to Double Driver.I understand your point of view, which you have already explained a couple of times before.
What I'm claiming in regard to Double Driver is that it's easier to pinpoint the right drivers than looking for them individually.When a restore does not work with DD ,it does not work either with the vendor's drivers, according to my (limited ) experience on this matter.
A far as my actual problem, I already described it in my post # 12.
Thank you for your help.

Hello Romeo,

Thank you very much for getting back to us.

I appreciate your efforts in pointing us in the right direction, regarding the initial issue description in your post #12, however, can you please elaborate about the problems you are experiencing. After your post #12, I asked if there were any issues and if you could describe them to me, but in your post #14 you wrote that those were not the problems that I asked about, but most likely others. Could you please clarify?

I would really appreciate if you can get to me with an update.

Thank you.

HELLO Anton,
What I tried to say was that the failure to restore from one computer to another is not caused by hardware or software problems on either of these computers.
When the backup process is over ,I got a MESSAGE ''RESTORE OPERATION FAILED''.
Is there anything else to clarify?
Thank you.

Hello Romeo,

Thank you for getting back to me.

Please provide me with the recovery logs, this will help us resolve this issue. To collect the logs do the following please:

 - After the recovery completes with the restore operation failed message, do not exit the recovery CD and navigate to - Navigation->View Log. In that menu, if you click on the little diskette icon which is called "Save all to file", you can save the recovery logs.

Can you also let me know which recovery CD you are using and which build it is.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Hi ANton.The version I use is Acronis True Image Home 2010 Plus Pack,Media Bootable, build #6053.
Here are 2 logs as requested.One was generated from a restore attempt using Double Driver and the other using the vendor's drivers.
Thanks for your help and anticipated solution.

Hello Romeo!

Thank you for the information provided, it was really helpful.

Somehow it cannot install some particular drivers, so I would suggest you to try the following:

1. Update the bootable media to be of the latest build (7046). You can find it in your account.
2. Make sure you have ALL chipset (and any dissimilar mass storage device hardware) drivers extracted and placed in one folder.
3. Restore once again

Should th issue persist, please gather the following information: 

1. BSOD message
2. AUR log (the one Anton requested previously)
3. What exact drivers are you specifying

This will help us to localise the issue and find out what drivers are missing and why.

Let us know in case there is anything confusing, I'll gladly explain!

Thank you in advance for cooperation.