How to handle issues with the recovery onto the dissimilar hardware (with Acronis Universal Restore)

Dear Customers,
Sooner or later most of you face the need to recover onto the dissimilar hardware (with Acronis Universal Restore) . We have designed this KB article that will guide you through the process of recovery, feel free to refer to it.
Please note that all the unrelated comments will be deleted without reply.
All the diagnostic information requested in the thread should be provided to the support only due to security reasons.
Normally everything works fine, and according to our support statistics we do not receive many assistance requests related to the recovery onto the dissimilar hardware, but we would anyway like to share the diagnostic tips with you, as it may be useful:
Sympthoms:
- Acronis Universal Restore doesn't appear
- The target drive is greyed out, and you cannot select it
- Restored machine doesn't boot
Solution:
First of all, please check the following:
- The image in question contains a partition with a Windows operating system. It is preferred that image contains entire source disk.
- The Windows operating system is not supported
- Windows 95
- Windows NT 4.0
- Windows 95 OSR2
- Windows 98
- Windows ME
- Windows Embedded
- Windows CE.
Acronis Universal Restore does not support these operating systems.(!) OEM versions of Windows are supported.
- Validate the image to make sure it's not corrupted.
If the backup is reported to be corrupted, please, follow these troubleshooting steps - Partition with a Windows operating system is selected for restoration. It is always better that the entire hard disk is selected for restoration.
- If possible, move the archive to another location, as the faulty connectivity to the target location may also cause various problems
- Make sure that the size of the archive doesn't exceed the size of the target drive
- Make sure that you follow the steps mentioned in the Acronis Universal Restore Guide
- Make sure that you have specified all the drivers for the dissimilar mass storage devices (motherboard chipset, RAID/SCSI controllers, etc.)
- Download the latest updated bootable media from your account, burn it onto the CD and test the recovery once again
- If after restore with Acronis Universal Restore the machine boots to Safe Mode fine but cannot boot to normal mode, export of this registry folder should be collected after booting to safe mode: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet
- If you have special drivers for RAID/HDD controller, force them when the Universal Restore wizard prompts for drivers (*.inf or *.oem files are supported).
- If forcing the drivers does not help (the operating system still does not boot or gives out a BSOD after being restored), try booting the computer from a Windows installation CD, hit F6 when prompted and check out whether the drivers work there. If they do not (the RAID/HDD is not detected), then get the latest version of the drivers (e.g. from the vendor's Web site).
If nothing of the above helps, please gather the following diagnostic information:
- Get Acronis Universal Restore Log (aurlog.txt)
After the restore process is done, go to View Log -> Save all to file and save logs to an external/flash drive or to a network share. - What happens to the machine after the restore (Black screen/BSOD?)
If possible, get the photo of BSOD.
If the system keeps rebooting instead of getting to BSOD, hit F8 on the bery booting and select option Disable automatic restart on system failure. - Get System Report from the target system via bootable media.
- Get a capture of Windows registry both from the source and the target systems
- Specify the Mass Storage Device Drivers you were using during the restore operations
- Get Acronis System Report from the restored system to get information on disk and partition structure.
After that please contact our Support team. Please provide them with the information about the steps taken - this will save your time. You can find useful information and tips regarding contacting support in this thread.
Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!
Thank you!

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Thank you, dev-anon. Post updated.
This link leads to the article that was meant to be public, but appears to be awaiting confirmation again. I will check it with our KB team, and meanwhile, I've left instructions instead of the link.
Thanks a lot!
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Yana wrote:Dear Customers,
Acronis Universal Restore Guide
Make sure that you have specified all the drives for the dissimilar mass storage devices (motherboard chipset, RAID/SCSI controllers, etc.)
I'm taking it point number eight should read,8. Make sure that you have specified all the drivers....(and not all the drives)?
Other than that I think this sort of sticky's are very useful, thanks
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Hello Emmanuel!
Thank you for your kind feedback, we really appreciate it!
And thank you for notifying about the typo. I have updated the information, it is correct.
Thank you!
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Is there any useful procedure to use ABR 11 UR to restore Win7 x64/SSD to an x32 machine? For example, if on travel I have copies of my Win7 x64/SSD backup files copied to a cheap x32 machine, it would be useful to not only view the files in the backup (which works fine using the bootable CD to view Files), but also to restore to a hard drive on the x32 machine to at least look inside some files, even under some kind of safe mode.
This sounds like it would not work well, if at all. However, perhaps someone has worked out a way of getting such a partial solution?
Thanks.
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Hi Lester, if you have an Acronis image file you can browse through the file by double clicking on the archive in Windows. It will not matter if the backup was done on a 64bit system and the OS you are browsing through the archive will be 32bit. You can also copy/past right out of the archive to another location on your system for a very fast ‘restore’ of any files located in your image backup.
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Datastor:
Thanks for your reply.
The 'quick restore' feature is interesting. I assume you are discussing an archive that is mounted.
The situation I was describing was using the boot CD on an x32 machine to access copies of Acronis backup files from an x64 machine, not mounting an archive under a full OS.
Right now there is no way of viewing the contents of even text files directly from the boot CD, although Acronis support said that was interesting enough to consider int he future. Acronis support also said that they did not think that an x64 image will boot at all on an x32 machine, so that would not work to view the files.
I was hoping there might be some way of having some file(s) from the x64 image dropped into the x32 space.
In my case the x64 machine runs under Win7 Ultimate x64, and the x32 machine runs under Ubuntu 11.04. I only have Acronis on the x64 machine.
Lester
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Hi Lester
If you have a flat .TIB file you do not even have to mount it all you need to have installed in your Windows environment is the Management Consol, this also includes the ability to 'browse' through your TIB files by simply double clicking on them. It will not matter if the system backed up was 32/64bit. Also the Management console does not require a license so you can install it on any machine you like to have the ability to quickly browse through your backup files. Hope that helps.
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I just tried to install the Management Console under Wine on Ubuntu 11.04 x32. The installer went a few steps forward until it said to restart the installer -- which just led to circles a few times. I assume the MC requires more windows software than that which comes with Wine.
I can still bring up directory and file structures using the boot CD, but I don't see how to save any files to put back into my next boot under Ubuntu.
Lester
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Hi Lester, I think it might be best to start a new topic/forum post on this as we seem to be hijacking Yana's post about UR... Please feel free to create a new post in the Backup and Recovery section of the forum...
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My harddrive failed, cloning a new harddrive in the same machine went very smoothly since I had saved backups to a second harddrive in the computer. My problems is, my old primary was 120 gb, my new harddrive is 200 gb, and now I have some 76 gb unallocated space. How can I combine partions to use the entire drive as drive C? Thank you for any help offered. Operating system: Win XP Pro 3, Backup archive: Acronis 2010 Home.
John Rollison
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Hi John, unfortunately you can't use Backup and Recovery to resize a partition that is already in place, during the restore it's possible but after the event and once the OS is running it's not. You can look at third party software such as Acronis Disk Director which does partition resizing of a volume.
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Hi!
I am on Win 7 and I am trying to use your program to transfer a fully loaded image drive ( Win 7) to a 2nd computer, without having to re-install all the programs.
I have symptoms 1, 3, namely : Acronis Universal Restore doesn’t appear and the restored image does not boot. In addition, I get the message “ autochk problem not found. Skipping autocheck” .
I ran a Windows boot-repair disk : it shows the recovered OS with the image, but it is unable to repair.
I have also run the Fixmbr, Fixboot, Rebuildbcd and CHKDSK commands on the command prompt, but it doesn’t help either.
I believe I meet all the requirements you have laid out, with the possible exception that the nominal size of the drive containing the image to transfer ( 460 GB ) exceeds the size of the destination drive ( 250 GB), but then the physical size of the image is only 39 GB, the remaining being empty unallocated space. So I thought this wouldn’t matter. As a matter of fact, the image does get transferred to the drive and I don’t get any message to the effect that the size of source drive exceeds that of the destination drive .
I thought that the problem could be with the drivers and I’d like you to help me on this.
At point 8, you say: Make sure that you have specified all the drivers for the dissimilar massstorage devices (motherboard chipset, RAID/SCSI controllers, etc.)
How do I specify these drivers?
In one of the attempts, in fact, I did get a prompt asking for a specific driver, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what this driver is and where should I look for it. The computer from which I am transferring the drive image does have a C.D. called “ MSI-Drivers and Utilities” containing a so called Intel Chipset. Do I have to just slip the CD, in the destination drive of the new computer? By the way, this prompt for the drivers doesn’t come up all the time, just as the Acronis Universal Restore doesn’t appear every time.
I’d appreciate your help.
Thank you
Ittiandro
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i had this server which has a uefi bios supported. we had a backup image and need to restore to a vm.
however during restore, they will create an addition uefi partition. we cannot restore 5 partiton.
our bios is set to boot from mbr.
Regards,
Kuah
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If the product you have is with Universal Restore, I'd boot from rescue media and create required layout in Disk Management from rescue media, then restore to it. If not, and you use 'restore to a new VM' from Windows environment, I'd add another disk in VM machine settings for your fourth partition (New Volume D:) to overcome the limit of partitions on MBR disk.
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the problem is why acronis created extra 1 partition. my original is only 4 partition
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any way to avoid that extra partition ?
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any way to avoid that extra partition ?
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i would like to have the same structure as before, when there is extra partition, the windows boots failure
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> the problem is why acronis created extra 1 partition. my original is only 4 partition
It's hard to say without details about source machine and resulting non-bootable configuration, and it's best to do it with an open support incident, if suggested workarounds didn't work or are not acceptable.
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Hi Wee hian kuah
There is many possibilities for what you are currently experiencing an I must agree with some of the other suggestions provided in that creating more than a single Virtual HDD for the recover to work around the BIOS system partition limit or log a support case with Acronis to help you look into the root issue and see if it can be worked around or not (it's possible it could be a physical hardware limitation and not possible to restore to a single BIOS based HDD volume).
Another source of information to understand some of the basics of this rather complex conversion process I would suggest having a read (if not already done): http://www.acronis.com/support/documentation/ABR11.5/#12540.html
Another good link I would suggest is the following: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx
Good luck!
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