Specifying Driver Path for Universal Restore (True Image Home 2010 Plus Pack)
Ok, here is my situation...
I had desktop PC which died the other day. I had been making daily backups of the PC to an external USB drive. I have a complete backup, and it is valid, on that external USB drive, and have been able to restore it to another external USB drive. However, I am trying to get the restored version on the second external drive to boot on a laptop (until I'm able to purchase another desktop PC). When I tried to boot up with it initially it tried, but quickly failed as Win 7 began to load, since of course the various drivers etc don't work since it is dissimilar hardware. So, I tried again and made sure to enable the universal boot option so that Acronis will make the needed changes. This is where I'm running into problems. Acronis asks for path to search for the drivers, and I'm not sure what to use. I know whatever drivers it needs are located on the native drive on the laptop, and I can see that drive from within Acronis (it won't be touched during the restore process, since I'm restoring to an external USB drive, not that internal laptop drive). But, I don't know what path(s) to include. I tried \windows\, \windows\system\, and \windows\windows\system32\, but during the restore process Acronis eventually failed saying it couldn't find the drivers it needed. I've since dug a bit further, and discovered that Win 7 stores its drivers in \Windows\System32\DriverStore\. My question is, if I give Acronis that path for the drivers, will it find what it needs there, or do I need to add other paths?
Thanks for any help anyone has.
Thanks for the reply. Actually, I've been able to boot from a USB backup just fine previously (on the old desktop PC), and was able to boot a backup of the laptop's drive from USB previously as well. Now I'm just trying to boot the backup of the desktop using the laptop, so I'm trying the universal restore (which I didn't need in the other two instances, since I was just booting from backups of themselves).
I have been able to view the files when I restored them and mounted the USB drive, so if worse comes to worse I can try to do what I need in that manner, but would prefer to actually be able to boot the old OS. I would have restored to a spare disk/partition on the laptop, but alas there's no room :-(.
But, since I've had no trouble booting from an external USB backup in the past (at least backups of the same system), I figured it would work, and was just a matter of using the "universal restore" feature, which I hadn't needed to use in those cases (I simply tried it to see if it worked both of those times).
ATI has this feature to boot into a backup, but what works only on the same computer.
Gotcha, thanks Pat. Just out of curiosity though, in reference to my initial question. What path would one specify from a Win 7 installation to make sure Acronis finds the drivers during the universal restore?
Hi Thomas,
In order to put an image on a computer with dissimilar hardware, you have to download the chipset or the harddrive controler driver or even both, of the new hardware.
These driver files should be in the .oem or .inf format, etc, not .exe.You will probably find them on the constructor web site in the .exe format.You have just to extract them with a tool like 7zip.
Once done, you copy them on a USB key ,which is the path to use for universal restore.
I'm just about sure it won't boot if the hard drive used is USB, it should be internal.
Good luck and keep us aware.