Unable to Restore Backup to a "New" Hard Drive
I have a Windows 7 desktop machine. I have created a disk image on an external hard drive. I am trying to recover that image to a different hard drive. The new HDD already has a barebones Windows 7 installed on it. Both of the hard drives are Western Digitals, althought the original is a 1tb drive and the new drive is a bit smaller capacity, but plenty of space to hold the restored image.
I'm able to use my system recovery disk and get to the recovery screen where I would like to select the "Destination of Disk 1", but the item is greyed out and I am unable to select it and proceed with the restore.
Am I missing something simple? I sure need some assistance.
Thanks,
Doug


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Steve,
I did not use the sector by sector method. I did an image yesterday and another one today and I am not able to click on and select my target location when I try to restore either of the images.
I can see the C drive as one of the choices I could click on when "Browsing" for the location of the image, but a couple steps later when I need to pick the target to restore to, the C drive is greyed out.
(I am aware that the new drive will be wiped clean.)
It shouldn't be this difficult...
Doug
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Doug, how exactly are you doing the restore here?
Have you removed the original drive (after making the backup image on your external drive) or are you connecting this as an extra drive?
How is the new drive formatted, if it is?
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I have removed the original hard drive from the machine.
The new hard drive has a recently installed copy of Windows 7 on it.
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Doug, if the new drive is installed in the computer and already has Windows 7 on it, then there should not be an issue with doing a disk level restore of your disk backup from the original drive by booting from the Acronis Rescue Media.
The main checkpoint when using the rescue media is to ensure that you are selecting the correct drive as the drive letters shown can differ from how you see them from Windows, so check the size of the drive you are selecting is what you expect for the new drive.
See forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup for how to do a disk level recovery.
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Steve,
Thanks for all of your assistance, but I have given up. I am able to restore an Acronis image onto the same hard drive on which it was created, but am unable to restore it onto a different drive.
I downloaded a free imaging program called AOMEI Backupper and was able to do exactly what I have been trying to do with Acronis True Image for the past few days.
I gave it my best shot for too many hours!
Thanks again,
Doug
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I have a variation of this problem - the scenario is (I expect) an extremely common one so I must be making an obvious mistake. The intention is to upgrade the SSD drive on a (W10) laptop - it only has one drive slot. I made a full backup of the system to an external USB HDD. I then replaced the SSD with a (blank, larger) new one. I booted from recovery media and restored the full backup. The restore completed successfully, but the computer wouldn't boot. What on earth am I doing wrong here? The equivalent operation using windows native tools ('create an image' and restore using W10 recovery media) worked fine.
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Neil, welcome to these User Forums.
Which version of ATI are you using here when you have been booting from the recovery media and restoring your backup image file? (This forum is for ATI 2016).
Also, when using the recovery media you would need to save a copy of the Log for any activities performed as this information is lost as soon as you reboot. The log file may help show if any errors were detected during the restore?
One further point, any recovery being performed needs to match the BIOS mode used by Windows when booting from the recovery media - you can use the msinfo32 command in Windows to display the BIOS mode.
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Yes, I am using ATI 2016. The recover operation "completed successfully" according to the dialogue box (using bootable recovery) so I didn't think there were any errors to investigate. NB I used the latest version of standalone which was downloaded as an ISO from my account. The BIOS mode is UEFI : I can't remember seeing an option for changing it (!). Unfortunately, further diagnostics are impractical because dismantling the ultrabook to swap SSDs is a long and difficult operation and anyway I don't have another unused one. I guess what I'm looking for here is an idiot-proof procedure because the scenario I'm trying to mitigate is a drive fail, so I'll need to know how to reliably restore the system from a [full] backup onto a virgin SSD. I'd [perhaps mistakenly] thought that a simple 'restore everything' would do it. There must be some part of the process I missed. Is there a step-by-step somewhere?
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Neil, there isn't a specific step-by-step guide that will also work for all different recovery / restore scenarios - only a general approach that may need to be adapted according to each scenario.
Forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup was written as such a guide but assumes that the user has first booted their Acronis Rescue Media in the correct BIOS mode needed for their specific computer system. Doing a disk level recovery avoids the issues that trip up users when being asked to select and resize individual partitions.
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OK, thanks Steve, I'll read that - hopefully I'll not need to do it for real. However, for anyone else reading this far, I'd recommend that for this particular replacing-SSD scenario simply use the W10 native functions which work straight off. I spent days trying to get Acronis to do the job and but completed it in half an hour with Windows backup! I'm sure it'll be easy / obvious how to do this with ATI if you're an experienced user, but...
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