Unable to create drivers requested for Restoring Partitions
I am into multibooting. I recently had a disaster after trying to add Win8 to the mix. I thought that I was lucky to have backups of most of my partitions on my external usb hard drive, but they aren't of much use to me so far. The only one that successfully restored was the one for XP and even that one was a fluke. I "reinstalled" XP from the installation disk after restoration before I got it back to what I had initially. I'm not sure how that worked the way it did. After the XP restore wasn't bootable and I couldn't repair it, I decided to do a clean reinstall of XP on top of what was there. I did a quick format before installing. When I got back to my computer (it was an unattended process) the whole thing was back the way it was with all software, updates, etc. Evidently the quick format I did, did not really erase the restored data. I have been unable to restore Vista, however, and see no point in even trying. There seems to be no way of predicting what drivers it's going to ask for. I extracted all the Vista 64bit inf sys oem etc. files from the mobo site to a usb drive; nevertheless Acronis kept asking for XP hard drive drivers even though I was trying to restore Vista, also XP PCI drivers, etc., etc. It's the first time in 50 years of computing I have needed to manually download a hard drive driver. Any help in surviving this "driver hell" would be much appreciated.
Thank you very much for the prompt reply. I have been attempting to restore various operating systems using the Acronis boot CD. I was restoring to the same computer that I backed up from, so was my mistake to have checked "Universal Acronis restore?" I backed up each partition separately, so perhaps I should have left that option unchecked. My main OS (first one installed and first partition on the disk) was XP. I did have Win8 working along with XP, Vista, and Win7. I can't recall what I did that resulted in my losing the ability to get into the mulitboot MBR. It happened a few days after doing the Win 8 installation. I think it was related to another partition containing data that I lost access to that was not backed up and my attempt to use a partition recovery program to recover that partition. I have since given up hope of getting that data back. I did not manually choose to do a system repair for XP. I was annoyed at this point and wanted to be sure of being able to reboot, so I chose to do a clean install. That's why I was surprised when I came back to my computer after eating my meal and found XP loaded with my old background image and desktop thumbnails and all software including Windows updates working perfectly. Anyway, at this particular moment I have XP working with two versions of Vista. Both versions of Vista were clean installs. I tried to restore the 64-bit Vista from a backup but in the process had to ignore the request for various drivers and subsequently lost the ability to boot. Looking into Vista Drive management I see that both XP and Vista 32 are primary and active. Vista 64 says primary but not active even though it is working from the triple boot menu. I was about to attempt the recovery of either my Vista 64-bit (in place of the one that is there) or Win7. I will need to reinstall my Win8 as I do not have a backup of that one. What I am afraid of, of course, is that it will want drivers which I will have to "ignore" and will end up not being able to boot at all. When this happens the normal Windows startup repair fails. thanks for your consideration of my problem and my best move next.