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Universal Restore for Newbies

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I've restored my system disk through the standard disk restore process many times.  But, my Windows 7 PC has now crashed and I'll have to use Universal Restore for the first time on new hardware and in Windows 10.

I've read the ATI 2019 instructions for Universal Restore.  But, I'm a bit un-nerved by what may be involved.

One area that I'm wondering about is the need to copy drivers for the new hardware:

  • Before applying Universal Restore to a Windows operating system, make sure that you have the drivers for the new HDD controller and the chipset. These drivers are critical to start the operating system. Use the CD or DVD supplied by the hardware vendor or download the drivers from the vendor’s Web site. The driver files should have the *.inf, *.sys or *.oem extensions. If you download the drivers in the *.exe, *.cab or *.zip format, extract them using a third-party application.

Do I simply make a copy of the Windows/inf folder and store it on an external drive?

Since I will be working with a brand new system.  I gather that I should be backing up the original system before doing the Universal Restore.  

Are there other things that I need to be careful with when trying to transfer my existing programs from my old system disk to new hardware?

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Bruce, some questions:

But, my Windows 7 PC has now crashed and I'll have to use Universal Restore for the first time on new hardware and in Windows 10.

What exactly are you intending to do here?  
Are you keeping Windows 10 on the new computer, given that Windows 7 is now unsupported since mid January?
If you are keeping Windows 10, then what are you wanting to restore to it from Windows 7?

If you are wanting to restore Windows 7 on to the Windows 10 computer, does 7 support all the new hardware components in the new system, and are there drivers available from the new system makers support site for Windows 7?

Personally, if your new Windows 10 system came fully activated for that OS, then I would go for a clean start on the new computer, and just restore my user data (documents, images, music etc) from the old system and reinstall any applications that you need.

Regardless of what you are intending, make a full disk backup of both systems before attempting any other actions.

You will also need to identify how both of the systems boot into Windows from the BIOS, i.e. are both systems using UEFI / GPT?  I would expect all new systems to do so, but your older Win 7 system may be still using Legacy / MBR, so would need to be migrated if being restored to the new hardware (unless the BIOS on that system still supports Legacy / CSM boot).

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media which will help you identify the OS BIOS boot mode.

See KB 61158: Acronis True Image 2019: how to restore to dissimilar hardware and also KB 19296: Acronis products cannot be used to transfer applications to different system or upgrade OS

Thanks Steve:

  • My old computer died and I bought a new one with Windows 10.
  • Since Windows 7 is no longer supported, I'll be using Windows 10 moving forward.
  • I was looking for an easy, quick way to restore my old system on the new computer.
  • Universal Restore sounded like it might be quick.  But the more I look at it, I think it is complicated and there are probably some other downsides.
  • Based on your comments, I will likely clean install all my applications on the new computer.  It will take some time to do all of this, but I guess it should be a safer bet.
  • Since I had all my data stored on a separate drive, I can simply move the drive to the new computer.

I would definitely go for a clean installation. If there are any files on the old Win 7 installation you can open the most recent backup file and copy them to the new system.

Doing a new installation allows you to review the applications you have installed to see if they are still needed or if they need updating (either with newer version or a different app that does much the same thing).

Ian

Bruce C.  To clarify, Universal restore won't do what you're looking for.  There's nothing that will seamlessly transfer all of your applications, settings, profile and data from Windows 7 to Windows 10 (not in Acronis, or other products).  It's a manual migration for the most part (although there are some tools that claim to migrate profiles, not apps - which in my experience, don't work well).

Universal restore is really designed to take an existing OS, "as is" and allow it to boot on a different computers hardware by removing the old systems specific drivers and using generic drivers - basically like what you get out of the box on a fresh Windows installation and then you'd proceed to update the drivers as needed.  That's also assuming the new computer doesn't have any unique hardware or bios restrictions built in (some new computers only allow UEFI and if your old computer was legacy that could be an issue... or, if a new computer has a PCIE NVME hard drive, Windows 7 can't boot on it ... OK it can, but not easily as it's not natively supported in Windows 7). 

Overall Windows 7 doesn't migrate very well to modern hardware in a lot of cases, but in this case, yeah, since Windows 7 is end of life and you plan to take advantage of the new computers Windows 10 license, just bite the bullet and build your new Windows 10 system from scratch this one time.  Then copy your data over (pictures, documents, music, videos, etc) as needed from the old drive, but plan to install the applications and things manually. 

Once you have it all setup the way you like, start with fresh backups so you have the ability to restore or recover the entire OS or certain data in it in case the hardware fails, you get malware, etc down the road.  Plus, Windows 10 will make migrating from this new computer, to a different computer, a lot easier if you need to to that down the road too.

Thanks everyone for your help.

I am working through the clean install and everything seems to be working fine.  

It's just taking a long time.