[Solved] Trouble using Universal Restore 2016
I'm stuck. I am trying to restore a Windows 7 backup to completely new hardware with an unformatted hard drive. I'm booting using the Universal Restore DVD. When it comes up, it says, "Cannot find an operating system on the current machine." Well, no, it's a new drive! My options are "turn off" and "reboot".
What should I do?


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Steve Smith wrote:Michael, sorry but you have not understood how Universal Restore is intended to be used. There is no operating system found because you have not first restored your Windows 7 backup to the new computer / unformatted hard drive using the standard Acronis Rescue Media first.
You are right about my not understanding. Nevertheless, I did try the restore first. I booted from the Acronis Boot/Recovery disk first. Selected the Recovery option and it said, "loading Acronis." I then got a blue screen (light blue, not BSOD) with a cursor that I could move around, but that's it. I could see the activity LED of attached USB drive containing the Acronis backup files flashing. It stayed that way for about 40 minutes before I gave it up. I also tried with another boot disk in case the 1st one was bad. Same thing. That's when I resorted to the UR disk.
Note: If your old Windows 7 OS is for an OEM licensed version, i.e. one provided with a Dell, HP, Acer etc branded PC then this will need to be activated on the new computer but will not be transferable as this is not possible with OEM licenses, so you will need to purchase a new license.
Well, this is from an HP that I need to retire. Are you saying I can restore it to different hardware, but I'll need to purchase a license, or that I can't even restore it at all?
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You can restore, however you will need a Windows Licence. If you are loading onto another OEM system, then you may be able to use its Windows Licence (with Windows 7 units this is often on a sticker on the bottom of notebooks or on the back of Desktops). It is getting difficult to get Windows 7 licences (the licence will work with 32 bit and 64 bit); You can still find Windows 7.1 from online retailers (some provide serial number and download link). There is only limited Windows 7.1 support from microsoft:
End of mainstream support January 13, 2015
End of extended support: January 14, 2020 (no more security updates)
So it may be time to upgrade particularly as some new hardware does not work as well with 7.1 as 10.
Ian
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IanL-S: In fact, this is part of an upgrade. I'm trying to move the WIN7 stuff to a legacy machine ... just in case. I've moved WIN7's to other machines and used other motherboards, etc. in the same machine. In general, I've had no problem typing in the original license number to get it legit.
Steve Smith: I've done as you've instructed. In fact, I think the backup I was trying to use was corrupt in some way. I created a new backup and the Acronis Recovery did not spin its wheels for 45+ minutes. So, I did the normal restore. Booting that just gave a screen full of 99's. So I next booted the Universal Restore drive. It asked for the driver, "Cannot find driver 'PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_30F1&SUBSYS_83A41043&REV_A3' for WINDOWS 7." I've not been able to locate this driver via google. Seems like I've been here before trying to restore a VM. Turns out in the case of the VM I didn't need Universal Restore, just the normal Recovery. In this case the normal recovery doesn't boot.
Advice? Do I need to find this "PCI\..." driver somewhere or is this message due to something else? The original computer is an HP 2000 with AMD E-450 CPU, Radeon HD Graphics and HP 3577 motherboard. The target machine has an AMD Phenom II X2 560, NVIDIA GeForce 7025 video card and ASUS M4N68T-M-V2 motherboard.
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Michael, I cannot find any hits for the missing PCI driver (same as you), but I would recommend going to the ASUS website and getting the latest motherboard chipset drivers for your board, which should include support for the CPU. The other area where you may need drivers are for your disk controller assuming that this is different to the original controller in the HP system. These should be included in your Universal Restore media to allow the drivers to be injected into your restored OS.
Note: you shouldn't be attempting to boot the restored OS into Windows before using Universal Restore to prepare it if that is is what you were doing when you saw a screen full of 99's.
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Steve Smith: I downloaded NVIDIA_Chipset_v1556_WYVista64.zip from ASUS for my M4N68T-M-V2 motherboard. I unzipped the archive and put it onto a USB flash drive. When I booted UR, I both specified the overall folder and under "driver", pointed to the IDE subfolder. Of note, when I selected the IDE folder, nothing showed under that folder, so I suspect that, despite the name of the archive, this may not have actual chipsets. The folders are all full of .ddl, .info, .ini files and it very much looks like something that actually needs to be run on a live system. Do chipset files have a specific file type?
In any case, I got the same "cannot find driver" message. I'll look around some more.
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Michael,
So, it sounds like your old system was on an IDE hard drive? Please note that when restoring an image, the SATA mode should be the same on both systems. Technically, your new system probably doesn't have an IDE controller (I'm assuming).
This is a Windows limitation - especially in older OSes like Win 7, Vista and XP. 8.1 is better at this and Win 10 is pretty good, but your bios still needs to have the same type of SATA controller options (in most cases).
ULTIMATELY...
1) Take a backup of the old, original OS "as is" for posterity.
2) Boot the original IDE drive OS install again on the original machine and perform the changes to the OS to prepare it for the change from IDE to SATA and power off completely.
http://winaero.com/blog/switch-from-ide-to-achi-after-installing-window…
or
http://www.overclock.net/t/1227636/how-to-change-sata-modes-after-windo…
3) Then take a new "offline" image and restore that to the new hardware. Before you boot the restored OS, make sure the SATA mode in the bios is set to AHCI already.
4) You may then need to run UR to further generalize the drivers for the OS with the new hardware. In most instances, I ignore compatibility errors and just run UR despite the warnings. System will most likely boot and then you can install drivers for the new hardware after that. If you get BSOD's still, try bootin in SAFEMODE and installing drivers for the new hardware from there instead.
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Well, maybe you spent time on those instructions for naught. Actually, my old system is SATA. I pointed to the IDE folder of the chipset archive because my choice of folders is: Awy, Display, Dthernet, IDE, SMBUS, and SMU. I just assued the IDE folder would have drive related info, and in fact the specific folder I pointer to was E:\NVIDIA_Chipset_v1556_W7Vista64\NVIDIA_Chipset_v1556_W7Vista64\IDE\Win764\sata_ide. That folder has a bunch of .dll's, a .cat, a .inf and a .sys. Hmmm. The README.txt file has:
This Win7/WinVista 64-bit nForce UDA driver package for MCP61, MCP72, MCP73, MCP78, and MCP7A consists of the following components:
Ethernet Driver (v73.30) WHQL
Network Management Tools (v73.25) "Sedona"
SATAIDE Driver (v11.1.0.43) WHQL
SATARAID Driver (v11.1.0.43) WHQL
RAIDTOOL Application (v11.1.0.43) WHQL
SMBUS Driver (v4.79) WHQL
SMU Driver (v2.08) WHQL
GPU Driver (v197.13) WHQL
PhysX (v9.10.0129)
Away Mode Driver (v6.0.6000.115) WHQL
Installer (v8.36)
I've posted a question asking Hardware folks about chipset info for this motherboard.
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Cool - if the old system was using SATA as well, then I would just try running UR without supplying any drivers, despite the popups and/or warnings.
I've been able to just ignore them an press the restore button anyway. That should generalize the drivers to Windows 7 "default" drivers - similar to a fresh install of Win 7 where no additional drivers have been provided at that time either. IN most cases, the system will still boot, unless there is something truly unique (like a RAID controller that is being used for the hard drives).
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Tried as you advised. I hit 'ignore' twice, when it finished (almost immediately thereafter) I clicked reboot. Got the screen half-full of 99's. Tried the normal recovery again, from scratch, then UR again. Same thing. I guess I'm stuck, eh?
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Can you take a cell phone screenshot of what you see - I've never seen such a screen so am not sure what you're seeing exactly. NOt sure if it's Acronis doing this, or Windows, or your bios boot order. A pic may help identify the 99's as to what they represenet (a BSOD error code or something else entirely).
Some other things you might also try in the meantime, as I can only guess at the moment (those screenshots will help hopefully though - take them with a cellphone cam).
1) Create a WinPE UR bootable media (the default is Linux based). WinPE tends to have better driver support all around. You would need to download and install Windows ADK first. 2016 should support ADK for your particular system. You can download ADK directly from the main Acronis rescue media builder. Once insalled, run the UR media builder manually and pick the winpe option. It's located at:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Acronis\UniversalRestore\UniversalRestore.exe
2) You also have direct technical support with Acronis until they release 2018 - take advantage of it if need be - they may have a record of this paritcular issue as well. I'd try the WinPE first though and see how that goes.
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I've attached the screen shot you requested. I'll try building the WinPE UR.
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Michael, all the hits I find on Google based on your screen shot point to this being either related to a Linux boot issue or a corrupted MBR.
Not sure that this helps a great deal other than to confirm that this is a MBR system, and if so, to try doing a FIXMBR assuming that you have a Windows Install or Repair disc to try booting from where you can issue this command.
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So... that doesn't help much either - wasnt' what I expected. Like Steve, I only see references to this for Linux so can't think why your system is behaving like Linux unless it's booting to the wrong device by default after the restore and UR, or possibly another externally attached drive that has Linux software, but isn't really bootable.
Here's what I'd try next
1) remove your UR disk from the system now.
2) Power off and boot directly into the bios - Hard power off if need be, pull the AC power (and battery if using a laptop). Press power a few times to dissipate remaining current. plug ac power back in
3) boot straight to the bios (F2 - or whatever you need to press). What is the first boot priority? Iss it still listed as your main drive, or something else like the CD-ROM or USB or another hard drive?). Make sure it's set to the hard drive you want.
4) Save bios and exit. Let it boot - still have 9's?
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BOBO_3C0X1, That Linux comment gave me a thought. In fact, the drive I used for this is a retired 1.5TB former Linux drive. With Linux, I deleted all the partitions and used the recovery disk to create the new partitions prior to the restore. Possibly that didn't work completely and something Linux-esque remained on the drive (even though I did tell AR to restore the MBR).
I'll start from scratch, but is there a way to truely wipe the drive, including boot sectors? Will the Acronis Drive Cleaner tool do it?
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Yes, the drive cleaner should do it. That's overkill though. Just use the "add new disk" option in the recovery media, point it at the drive and it will intiialize it - that's as good as a full format. Otherwise, you can format it from another Windows computer using the attached intructions.
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405931-136951.pdf | 615.02 KB |
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After formatting the drive to be on the safe side, when you restore, just keep it on "automatic". If doing a full disk restore, it will format and parition for you to match the original full disk backup.
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I've tried several things. I've tried manually creating and NTFS formatting the partitions on the target drive exactly as on the source dirve. I've tried writing zeros to the whole drive. No go. I'll either get a "grub" error, or the screen of 99's. grub is a Linux boot loader, I don't use that on Linux so I'm guessing it might be something from Acronis since I think Acronis runs Linux at some level.
I'm about ready to give up on this, but I have a final thought. The source machine is dual-boot Linux/Windows using the Linux lilo boot manager. Is it possible the ATI backup is somehow picking that up from the boot sectors and that's what's messing me up? The backup I'm trying to recover was done with ATI2014 and the restore with ATI2016. Does a more recent version of ATI "fix" this? I'd be happy to get an upgrade and try doing another backup. Is there a way to remove the dual boot from the source machine so only Windows is involved (perhaps that is a question for a Linux forum).
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Michael, if you are booting from the Acronis Rescue Media, then you could disconnect your internal dual-boot drive (and any other drives) to just leave the drive you are trying to restore to, and the external drive that has the image being restored. That way there can be no interference from any of the other drives.
With regard to cleaning the target drive, then you could use the following commands (but please make sure you select the correct drive to clean).
diskpart
list disk (to identify the correct target drive, i.e. 1)
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit
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Steve Smith: I'm doing the restore to a completely new machine. There is no other drive connected other than the target drive. I did both create and format the partitions on one try, and zeroed the drive on another try. I didn't actually do the procedure using diskpart as you suggest. In fact, I could not get the source computer to recognize the target drive as it had the same ID as the real boot drive and therefore was not seeable. I'll try the diskpart on a completely different drive and post results.
LATER ...
I did the diskpart as you suggested, then the Restore. no go. Upon boot I got:
error: no such device: [UUID ...]
Entering rescue mode ...
grub rescue>
This must be an acronis thing as there are no vestiges of Linux on this completely different drive unless Restore is grabbing something from the backup. Next, I'll try doing the restore again, then going to UR before trying to boot.
LATER ...
Tried letting Restore re-partition, then Restore and Universal Recovery. Same "grub" error.
Any other ideas or is it time to throw in the towel on this one?
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Michael, the only other suggestion to offer is to create and use the Windows PE Rescue Media instead of the Linux based standard one - if you still see errors related to grub then it cannot come from Acronis though where it comes from may remain a mystery!
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SOLVED! Since the source computer was dual-boot, I thought maybe that was messing things up because of the lilo boot loader being in the boot sector and Acronis restoring the MBR, but having no Linux partitions. So, I did a full backup of ALL partitions, including the Linux partitions. When the restore was completed, I booted a Linux DVD first, mounted the Linux root partition and ran the lilo program to put the boot info back on the boot sector. On Linux with root partition /dev/sd3 mounted on /mnt:
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /dev/mnt/dev
chroot /mnt
lilo -M /dev/sda
lilo
exit
umount ... # all of the above mounts ...
reboot
That did the trick! At first, I did get that "grub" message and I was about to give up, but then I rebooted again and it came up with the Slackware boot screen to select an OS. I've booted a couple of time since and no "grub" message and it boots just fine.
I'll definitely have to add this to my Acronis documentation notes regarding dual-boot systems. I'm surprised I found nothing on this when searching, but maybe I'm just a bad searcher.
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Michael, thank you for posting the information on your solution to this problem, we don't get too many dual-boot problems reported in the forums and the key recommendation for those with these are to try to have the different OS's on separate physical disk drives rather than having them on different partitions of the same disk drive. This may not be possible on single disk systems but does make life a lot simpler otherwise.
Please can you edit the title of your original post #1 to mark it [Solved] in the Subject of the post.
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