Successful bare metal restore of Win7 on Dell T1500
If you recall, I've been struggling to get Acronis Home 2010 working properly on a new Dell Precision T1500 running Win7 64-bit. The Acronis product loads and runs but I cannot get the PC to boot from recovery media. I've had a contact open with Acronis for weeks and for a while they were sending me a new recovery ISO every few days. However, they all had the same issue, that is, the PC would start to boot, display the blue Acronis splash screen for a few seconds and then reboot. It would then continue in this reboot loop.
Ironically, the PC boots fine from my Acronis 11 recovery media. So as a test I booted from the True Image 11 media and made a full image backup to my second internal drive. In order to test the bare metal restore recovery process I then purchased a new identical 500GB boot drive and restored my image backup using the ver 11 recovery CD.
The recovery worked fine but when I rebooted the PC from the hard disk I got this weird error saying Windows could not start and that something wasn't recognized on the new disk. I suspected an issue with the partition order or something as these new Dell's have three partitions; a diagnostic, a recovery and a primary partition. As a second test I was going to try restoring an image taken using the built-in Win7 disk imaging utility.
When I booted the Win7 System Repair Disk it asked me if I wanted to restore and image or repair the problems on the existing disk. I figured I would give repair a try. It only took a second, the PC rebooted and now runs fine. So I'm assuming that Acronis either did not activate or number the partitions correctly and that the Windows System Repair Disk was able to correct the problem.
I am close to completely giving up on Acronis 2010. If it cannot backup and restore my PC it is of no use to me. Why does my old ver 11 CD work fine yet the new 2010 version will not?
When I have some more time I am going to try a bare metal restore using the Win7 utility. But for now I at least know that I can backup my system and successfully restore it from a bare metal state using a combination of the Acronis ver 11 boot CD and the Win7 System Repair Disk.
You are not doing a bare metal restore if all you did was restore to a new larger hard drive. Changing out the hard drive is supported in all versions and always has been.
Bare metal restore requires the at least TI 2010 and the PlusPack. It is intended to restore a machine with a new mother board and other new hardware or a newly built machine. TI version 11 does not have this capability at all. There does seem to be an issue with restoring to Dells though.