Trouble restoring

There are a number of hoops you'll have to jump through because you are trying to restore to different hardware. But it cannot be done with Home 2009 unless you make another backup on the old laptop after using Microsoft's Sysprep.

If the boot CD does not see your external drive it is because the CD runs on Linux and doesn't have the drivers to support the firewire drive. One way around this is to make a BartPE cd in which the True Image Plug-in for Bart is embedded. But you absolutely have to get the boot CD able to see your external drives (firewire and usb) as this is what you will use to carry out a restore.

If both laptops are using the same OS it might be worth the trouble. If the OS is different then you should reinstall your apps and just copy over the data since doing a restore (if you get it going) will put the old OS on to the new laptop.

Even with the same OS, some users prefer to reinstall all the apps as the new system will start off with a "clean" registry.

I tried again, this time,when booting from the CD, I got the error NTLDR is missing. Dont know what that is but I went back to my original hard drive, ran Acronis from it, had it re-partition the laptop new hard drive. Then, instead of the CD that I had made, I used the original program disc. It booted up, saw the fire wire drive (with the Acronis generated backups) and also the blank, new drive (now in the laptop). I started the restore, choosing the most recent incremental backup, I had made, from today. There were also backups that were labeled full rather than incremental but I chose the incremental one because it was the most recent. Acronis then came back with Error opening the file. I tried again, it seems to be working. Is it wrong to choose the most recent incremental, when doing a restore?
Thanks
Steve

looks like I needed to use iso burning software, to get the software on a CD, having done so, things now work