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Help needed for Universal Restore

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I am running TI 2016 on a 64 bit windows 7 machine running RAID 1.  I have no  problem  creating and validating backups. I am able to restore files and folders.

I want to be able to restore my operating system and files to another machine. The machine I would like to restore to  is a an older dell vostro 220 64 bit running xp. I installed an additional 1tb HDD which works fine on this machine.

I successfully created a universal restore bootable  media on a usb drive.  The drive  boots up fine. However I am confused about what to do next.

I want to restore the operating system on to the new 1 tb HDD which I installed.  I want to be able to boot from this HDD and leave the original C drive alone so that it boots normally using the original xp operating system

Is this possible?  Unlike using TI bootable medium I am  not offered the choice of where to install the restored system and I would prefer not to screw up the computer's original operating system.

Any advice on this would be appreciated. I figure that having this old computer around  is the best approach to instant disaster recovery.

Thank you.

 

 

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Universal restore is a tool to run on a sytem after you have deployed a backup image to the new hard drive in the new (in this case, old) system.   You need to use the default rescue media to take and/or restore Acronis images first.

What you're about to do though, i would not propose as XP is not very good with handling multiple drives with OS on it.  1) The bios tends to want to overwrite the bootloader when it detects multiple drives attached at the same time with different OS on them.  2) If the one syste has a SATA mode of RAID and the other system is using a SATA mode of AHCI, this is a problem.  If both systems have a SATA mode of RAID, you're OK.  3) If you are using an OEM license, you won't be able to activate it on the second system.  .

If you want to test restoring, I would highly recommend you remove the original XP drive until you've gotten things working with the newly restored OS on it's own to avoid other complications.  Better yet, use a drive caddy and only ever have one OS in use at a time to avoid poential issues.

That aside, if you're hell bent on trying to make this work (good luck, you're going to need it)...

1) Take a full disk backup of your current system.

2) remove the oriignal XP drive of the second system

3) install the new/blank hard drive into the second system

4) use your bootable recovery meida (not universal restore) to recover the backup to the new system on the new hard drive.

5) make sure the SATA mode of the new system matches the SATA mode of the original system in the bios.

6) make sure the bios shows the new drive as the first boot priority

7) now try to boot the newly recovered OS just to see what happens - you might get luck if the OS is Windows 10 or Windows 8.1.  Windows 7, probably not, driver support is not very good across different systems in Windows 7, Vista or XP.

8) If you get a BSOD (which you probably did) , now you boot your universal restore media and run it on the detected OS.  don't add any drivers, just run it.

9) now try to boot the system - hopefully it works... if not, and the system SATA mode is RAID, go back into universal restore and point it to the necessary RAID drivers - then try to boot again.

Once you have a working recovered drive, make sure it's licensed.  

If you're brave, and i CAUTION you here, you can try to connect the original drive (hopefully you have a backup of it too!!!!!) to the original SATA connector (usually SATA 0)  and move the new one to SATA 1.  Check the bios to make sure which disk is listed as the first boot priority.  

Hopefully your bios doesn't bork up the Windows boot manager on one or both drives.