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Recovery of image to Inspiron 3880 doesn't work. Finds no operating system.

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I'm unable to recover a full image made on an Inspiron 3880, either by the Recovery option within the program or with Universal Restore.  Both say cannot find operating system (hard drive)?  Any assistance appreciated.

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Bill, sorry but more information is needed to understand this issue?

How are you trying to perform this recovery operation?

Where are you trying to recover the backup image to?

What are you recovering to?  Is this to the same Inspiron 3880 or to a different PC?

Is the Inspiron 3880 still able to boot into Windows without doing the recovery?

The recommended method of doing any full disk image containing the Windows OS & apps etc is to do this using the Acronis Rescue Media.  This needs to be booted using the same BIOS boot mode as the Windows OS uses for the PC it is installed on, i.e. UEFI or Legacy mode.

The type of disk drive can influence the boot mode too, i.e. NVMe M.2 SSD drives normally require UEFI / GPT to be used as an OS boot drive.

The Acronis rescue media is capable of booting in both UEFI and Legacy boot modes.

See KB 63226: Acronis True Image 2020: how to create bootable media and KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 63295: Acronis True Image 2020: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

Note: if you are recovering a backup image to a new disk drive, then this may need to be initialised before it can be recognised.  This can be done using the Tools > Add new disk option in the rescue media, where again the choice is offered to prepare the new disk using GPT or MBR for the partition scheme.

Thanks so much for all the information, Steve!  I really appreciate it.

I've tried many things, but what I would really like to do is to recover an image created with ATI2020 on an older computer to a new Inspiron 3880, which has an M.2 SSD drive.

If I boot from the Universal Restore CD (created on the 3880), it says no operating system found, and only seems to see the external USB drive which contains the image.

I'll try this again shortly, but should this work?

Thanks again!  -bg

Bill, if your backup image came from an old computer with a different type of drive, then the next question here is 'what version of Windows OS' was on the old PC?

Ideally, the old PC should have been using Windows 10 and not an earlier version, especially not Windows 7 which did not have native support for NVMe M.2 drives.  Also, it is best if both PC's have been activated for the same edition of Windows 10 (Home or Pro) to facilitate activation of the OS from the old PC on the new one.

Note: the Inspiron should be booted from the Acronis rescue media in UEFI mode in order to be able to see the M.2 SSD.

 

Steve:

I think we are getting there with your help.  I changed the BIOS settings to UEFI and made a new rescue CD on this computer.  

However, when I boot from this CD, it still says "Cannot find an operating system on the current machine.".

I'm using the 64-bit version of the rescue program.  Should I try the 32-bit one?

Any other ideas?

Thanks a million...  -bg

Created 32-bit rescue CD.  Tried to boot to it, but it's not offered as an option after the F12 reboot.  Says:

Boot mode is set to: UEFI; Secure Boot: OFF; PTT is on;
 

UEFI BOOT:
     Windows Boot manager
     Onboard NIC (IPV4)
     Onboard NIC (IPV6)

Don't know what PTT is...  -bg

Created USB Flash Drive Boot rescue.  Same problem ("Cannot find an operating system").  -bg

Good news.  All of the above were tried using the Acronis Universal Restore tool.  I don't understand why we were never able to get it to work.

We tried the Rescue Media Builder and it worked like a charm on the same computer with the same BIOS setup.

Bill, good news that you were able to sort things out.

My recollection is that you use Universal Restore after having done the restore with ATI; when the restore is complete you will be asked to run Universal Restore - in substance it only injects any missing drivers. In almost all cases restoring a Windows 10 installation to new hardware will not need to resort to universal restore.

Ian

Thanks so much to both Ian and Steve.  Wouldn't have been able to get this computer working as it needed to without you. -bg

I had an Inspiron 3880 that would not clone the full HD.  What I found were three items. 

(1)  Inspiron 3880 did not have support for legacy boot USB.  It had to be created to support UEFI.  

(2) The drive 1 TB HDD had raid turned on.  During cloning, the raid was not supported.  Either the drives would not show or with drivers the Acronis would gray them out and were not selectable.

(3) WinPE USB boot drive would get an error message the drive could not be locked.   Linux-based media worked faster without the lock issue.   Without making changes 1 and 2 even the Linux-based media failed to clone the drive.

 

One thing I didn't like was the manual clone didn't show the original partition sizes making it difficult to properly size the dell restore portions.  I had to use a third-party partition tool to customize the dell partitions to match the original and shrink the OS partition to fit the SSD.

Good luck I hope this helps the next.