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Restore two backups to multiboot

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Hello.

Ive got 2 backup files (*.tib) Long story short, made backup of two laptops, and now want to transfer them 2 to one big ssd with multiboot option.One with Win7 64bit, and Win 7 32bit.

Is there anyway to restore them to multiboot? 

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Bartek, welcome to these User Forums.

Sorry but there are more questions to ask than answers to give for this question about restoring the two laptop images as a multiboot scenario.

The first question is simply to ask what BIOS mode did the two laptops use when booting into their respective Windows 7 OS?

The BIOS mode is shown when you run the msinfo32 command within Windows and will show as either Legacy (for older MBR systems) or as UEFI (for newer GPT systems).

I am not aware of any method of dual-booting where different boot modes are being used.

My own laptop uses a triple boot scenario with Windows 10 Insiders build, Windows 10 regular build, and Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS version but all these three OS's are all Legacy/MBR boot and all use the Windows Boot Configuration Data for launching the different OS.

One difficulty with attempting what you want to do here is how the laptops were each configured, i.e. did they each have a separate System Reserved partition to host the Windows BCD data store, or was this integrated into the Windows OS partition.  This applies to Legacy systems.  For UEFI systems, the BCD is stored in the EFI partition instead.

One further question:  what are you intending to restore these backup images to?

One thing is certain that you will be restoring to different hardware for at least one of the laptop images, even if both laptops were identical.  Hardware differences coupled with having Windows 7 will require the use of the Acronis Universal Restore tool to prepare the OS after being restored to work with the new hardware discovered.

If your laptops were running Windows 10 instead of 7, then life would be a lot easier as Windows 10 is a whole lot more tolerant of hardware changes than earlier versions of Windows.

Thank you for prompt reply.

I'm trying at the moment:

Two partitions on new drive.

Already restored one backup into first partition (have to repair startup with recovery disk) - done and working.

Then I installed fresh win7 on another partition, and then (at present) I'm trying to recover another image to that partition.

Hopefully this will work. Takes forever as backups are over 200gb.

Tried another way round, but second image failed twice on restoring (on portable drive there was marked with padlock - administrative rights issue to backup file, but now this is sorted and fingers crossed)

Lets see. Will update.

 

Bartek, thanks for the update - I wish you good luck with getting the restore done and all working.