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Acronis True Image Home 2013 - Need to Restore

Thread needs solution

Hello,

I have 3 copies of Acronis True Image 2013 Home. 

One of those computers crashed and the motherboard is bad. We need to restore to dissimilar hardware. How do I accomplish that now, I did not previously own universal restore? 

Can I buy it? Does it come on a restore cd? Can I purchase it for one of my other licenses and then make a bootable cd?

How can I restore to dissimilar hardware, how do I acquire universal restore when a hard drive functions, but the tower does not?

 

Thanks!!

 

Keith

0 Users found this helpful

Keith, welcome to these user forums.

In order to use Acronis Universal Restore you must have purchased the Acronis True Image 2013 Plus Pack which provides this functionality to the product.  If you don't own the 2013 Plus Pack, then you would need to contact Acronis Sales to determine if they could still make this available to you, though in all honesty, I doubt that they will do so due to the age of the product.

The next issue in considering what you are proposing is the potential that doing such a restore to dissimilar hardware would result in an unbootable system due to the significant differences that may be present between your old computer and any new computer you purchase today.

The process of doing a restore to dissimilar hardware requires a number of significant factors of both systems are compatible, this includes the disk controller mode must match, i.e. both use AHCI, both use the same disk partitioning scheme, i.e. both use MBR partitions with NTFS, or both use UEFI with GPT, similar with BIOS, both use MBR or both use UEFI at a BIOS level.

Most older systems will have MBR for BIOS and disk partitions, some may still use IDE / PATA disk drives, instead of SATA drives.
More newer systems now come shipped with EFI / UEFI BIOS, may have SATA drives using NVMe, M.2 or PCIe card based drives, and may be configured to use RAID for the disk controller (not AHCI), plus with larger drives be formatted as GPT (not MBR).

Without knowing a lot more information about both your old and new computer hardware, it is difficult to advice you more specifically, plus there may be other factors involved depending on which version of Windows OS you had on the old computer and the type of license held?

You're probably out of luck for 2013 since it's deprecated and support is only available for 2 years from product release (starting with 2015 and newer).  You should contact Acronsi technical support to see if they can still sell you the add-on for 2013 though. 

If not, UR is included in 2017 and should be able to get a discounted upgrade and build UR recovery media.  You can create UR to .iso, burn to disc or to a flash drive with the UR media creation tool. 

UR is not the end-all, be-all for dissimilar hardware.  Acronis makes it possible, but bios settings, features and limitations with newer systems can be a sticking point.  As an example, I'm sure your existing system backup is from a legacy/bios computer.  If you were to buy a new computer, it is likely to be UEFI/GPT.  If the system bios allows you to enable CSM\legacy support and the new drive is formatted to legacy/MBR and not bigger than 2TB, then techncially, you should be able to restore your image, run UR agains it and be on your way - the bios settings are all up to you to figure out though.  

This was a lot easier when all computers were legacy/MBR - and now more convulted since UEFI/GPT is becoming the norm. 

Also what type of OS license - if it's OEM on the old one and/or an older version of an OS not supported on newer hardware (no drivers) those can be other sticking points.  As an example, Surface Pro 4 only works with Windows 10 - you'l never get a working version of Windows 8.1 or earlier on it.  And you can get it running (but without necessary drivers for thigns like toucscreen), even then, if you only had an OEM license on the old machine, it isn't going to license on the new one.

There's more good info using UR here:  Sticky: Great Acronis "How-To" videos and other Acronis Resources