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Universal restore True Image 2020 cannot find the operating system

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Well once upon a time it was easy to use Acronis True image. Take a full partition backup, boot to recovery usb and restore to new hdd. Well not so. Upon trying the above machine won't boot AND if I try and use universal restore from the recover usb it says operating system not found. AND system won't boot. An endless loop of going into troubleshooting/repair. WTH Acronis. I have spent good part of a week trying to find a solution - and nothing.

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Michael, some comments here:

First, universal restore is never required for doing a restore / recovery to a new disk when this is in the same computer.  AUR is only needed when migrating to new computer hardware, i.e. a different computer, and then may not be needed if Windows 10 is being used on both the old & new computers.

Next, when doing any recovery using the Acronis Rescue Media, you need to match the BIOS boot mode used by Windows and use the same mode when booting the rescue media in order to get a successful outcome.

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

Further, when making a backup of an OS drive, you need to do this for the full drive so that all hidden / system partitions are included.  You cannot recover just a backup of the OS partition to a new drive and expect it to boot on modern computers - the hidden/system partitions on the drive are needed.

A note:  I moved from a 2tb drive to a 1tb drive in the same machine (the 2 failed in place).  Rescue media said I had to use AUR and wouldn't let me proceed.  AUR said it couldn't find an OS.  And I couldn't use the restore function of Acronis True Image because it won't let me access my old file to restore to differing equipment.  I'm probably missing something because, well, how many times does the user get into this situation (none if I can help it) so my experience level is low.  That said, I've got a perfectly good backup sitting on an NAS, waiting to be used, and I can't find the key to the door its locked behind.  And the Acronis help isn't helping.

John, welcome to these public User Forums.

Just recovering a backup to a different disk drive within the same physical computer should never require using AUR as the change of disk drive does not count as being different hardware!

I have never had any ATI rescue media tell me that AUR was required and the whole process of how AUR is used has a prerequisite of having to recover the backup image first before there is an OS for AUR to operate on!

In terms of recovering from a backup image stored on a NAS, then you either need to be using a wired network connection or else be able to connect to the NAS via USB (or copy the backup to a USB drive).

The only other consideration here is that you need to use the same version of ATI for the recovery as was used to create the backup image, or a later version of ATI rescue media.  This is simply because Acronis only guarantee backwards compatibility between images, not forward compatibility, i.e. ATI 2019 or earlier cannot open or recover any .tibx backups created by ATI 2020.