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I am true image 2015.  I needed to replace my hard drive since I had strong indications it was near failing. 

I couldn't a backup with the windows version of the program so used the acronis boot disk.  I installed the new drive, the bios detected the new drive, but acronis wouldn't until I used a Win 10 boot disk to install Win 10.  Then I attempted to recovery my backup version, but acronis wouldn't recognize the usb drive the backup was on.  Even after I finally got some recovery but windows reported problems and gave me the blue screen of death.  I am very disappointed.  I thought I could install a new hard drive and recover my system.

Comments please.

thanks,

 

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There's not enough to go on here to be of real use, but here are some thoughts

1) if your drive was already failing and had corrupted data or bad sectors, any backup of that disk will contain those bad files as well.  Just because Acronis may be able to backup a failing drive, does not mean it's goign to repair already corrupted data.  This is why it's better to have an ongoing backup scheme that gives you different backup dates/options.  You might have been able to get a good backup on Friday, the disk starts going to CRUD on Saturday and backs up, but the Saturday recovery is garbage, so you would then try the next latest (Friday) which could be just fine since the disk had not failed yet.

2) It sounds like you may have some unqiue hardware in your system.  Standard SATA and/or USB drives should have no problem being picked up with the Acronis bootable recovery media.  However, if your SATA mode is set to RAID, you may need to have additional RAID drivers to detect those controllers - the Linux media does not provide a way to inject those drivers.  If you're able to get to any working Windows system with Acronis, I would suggest you build WinPE rescue media (requires you to download Windows ADK and install it first - it's roughly 3.4Gb when installed).  BUT, even then, you'll need to add those RAID drivers as well.  WE've built an MVP tool to help with this and have supplied the latest IRST drivres (intel RAID) for Windows 7-10.  Unfortunately, the tool only works with the latest versions of 2016 and 2017.  You can inject drivers into your rescue media (if you're building a USB flash drive), but you'll have to use a third party tool like DISMGUI to help with that.  

3) What was the BSOD error?  Again, if files in the backup are corrupted, there's not much that can be done.  You could try to run the Windows installer over the restored OS in hopes that it would repair the OS installation in the process and it should keep your apps and data too.  

You'll want to Google the BSOD code to see what comes up.  It could be file/system corruption caused by your failing drive.  However, it could be you booted the rescue media in UEFI mode, but had a legacy/bios install... if so, then you need to go back and start the rescue media in legacy/bios mode to do the recovery (or vice-versa if you started it in legacy/bios, but your OS was a UEFI/GPT install). The BSOD error may shed more light.

I really suspect that you have a good backup, but corrupted files in it from the failing disk.  I would personally try to install Windows as an upgrade over the top of the recovered image in hopes that it can repair the corruption. 

I now have some further thoughts.  I assumed that if i installed a new primary hard drive, and if the bios recognized the drive and its size, the Acronis program would partition the new drive and copy the previous drive image to the new hardware.  It looks like doing that caused partitions on the drive and I couldn't install the image.  Besides, the Acronis boot program could not find the acronis windows backup since it was on a usb drive that was not recognized.  Bottom line, it looks like my assumptions were incorrect

I got a  Windows 10 install disk, and reset the disk partitions during the install to unallocated and was finally able to get Windows 10 on the new disk.  I got an error, and used the repair option to get to windows restore and restored a windows backup image to the drive.

Any comment on my Acronis assumptions?

Thanks,

Larry Drobnitch

Hi Larry,

If you backup an entire disk (with all paritions), when you restore the entire disk, it will automatically create those partiions and restore the content that's on them as well.  This is how dull disk backup and recovery is designed to work.  I'm not sure what you mean by it creating paritions and then not being able to install the image - let the software do all of the paritioning for you.  Take a disk backup - restore a disk backup - it's that simple.  If you try to manually parition and move things around, you're just making it harder.  However, at some point if you know it's just your OS you want to restore (C: parition), then, by all means, restore just the C: parition over the existing C: parition.  To keep it simple though, just do a disk backup and a disk recovery.

There is a caveat to restoring though and the same applies to Windows installers.  How you start the recovery media makes a difference.  In the past, PC's were simple as they were all using legacy/bios so there was nothign to think about, just backup and restore.  However, most new PC's are UEFI and/or can support legacy CSM (some enabled by default, some need to be enabled in the bios along with turning secure boot off).  Long story short, you should boot your rescue media to match how the OS image was.  If the OS was UEFI/GPT and you're restoring it, make sure to boot the rescue media in UEFI mode.  If the original OS was legacy/bios then make sure you boot the rescue media in legacy/Bios.  Each motherboard (bios/firmware) is different so this part is up to you to determine and make sure you're booting the media correctly.  Check out the screenshots from this post though, as it should help you identify the different boot types and how they look... the exact look will vary from system to system though. 

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/121829#comment-378318