Dead Dell Win7, New Dell Win 10 -won't restore
My husband's Dell XPS Windows 7 died and we bought another Dell XPS, Windows 10. Unfortunately, he had not made a System Recovery Disk or Acronis Bootable Media disk.
We probably had TI Version 12 on the Win7 machine. We bought Acronis 2016 today so we could restore his backup files. And, may I say here, that I cannot stand the 2016 interface. What was wrong with the old one? I never understand why developers feel they need to change the layout of something that has looked pretty much the same since the beginning.
Anyway, TI2016 will not restore to the new computer from the old external hard drive.
First, he created a new folder that he was going to restore to, but we kept getting failures. So, I tried restoring a single file to the equivalent folder, i.e. a song from the Music folder to the new machines' Music folder. That seemed to work. At least, it said "Success". So then I checked all his music (albums & songs within the backed up Music folder) and said to restore to the new Music folder. That was a success, too, I thought --until it showed me where they were restored and it wasn't to the Music folder but to the Documents folder.
Then, we find they aren't really there either. I don't know where they were restored to.
I've restored files on my pc's before but it's always been the same operating system and probably the same machine. We're pretty frustrated.
Any suggestions? Also, I find the restore instructions confusing. He's been doing incremental backups and the way I read the recovery instructions, he should restore the newest backup first and work back to the last full backup. Is that correct?
Thanks!


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Yes, please do not attempt to restore your old OS in it's entirety to your new PC unless they are very close in age /specs. Most "old" systems (4 years or more in "MOST" cases) have different bios setups (bios/csm/legacy/mbr mode) vs the the newer UEFI/GPT scheme. A lot of the new systems support either or both CSM and UEFI and can function in CSM/Legacy mode, but you don't want to limit new hardware using older legacy OS installs. You can, but it is definitely a step backward - especially on a nice XPS system that is supposed to be a higher end product. Dells usually support both options, but you have to make sure the bios is configured correctly and the drive is formatted correctly as well (MBR or GPT). On other systems though, some only support MBR and some only support UEFI so this can be problematic (for instance I have an older HP netbook that only does legacy bios and only reads MBR formatted rives / I have an ASUS T200 laptop that only boots UEFI and has no CSM/legacy bios support).
If your systems are both UEFI, you can restore your image to the new one though - assuming the bios is configured correctly (dont' forget to check the SATA mode to make sure it's the same too - RAID, AHCI or SATA are usually the options). You may also have to run Universal Restore if you get a BSOD after pushing the image if the drivers are too different - Univeral Restore generalizes your drivers to generic Windows ones and then you can install the drivers afterwards (Dell usually has a driver pack in .cab format with all system drivers that make this process a lot easier than some other manufactures).
As Enchantech mentioned though, with 2016 installed, you can double click your old backup .tib files and have them open in Windows Explorer and copy and paste files/folders out of them (DATA only - don't try to replace Windows and/or application files/folders this way). I have not used PCMover myself, but since Microsfot now longer has the profile mover utilting in Windows 10, looks like third party applicaitions are the only option for now.
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Thanks for the replies. I am most definitely not trying to restore the old OS. I'm simply trying to restore everything that was under documents. Therefore, yes, there are a lot of files to restore.
I must say I'm surprised that you would recommend something other than Acronis to restore all the files. I thought I was paying for a backup program that I could use for this very purpose, i.e. to store all the documents in the event a hard drive crashes.
Since we just bought 2016, I think I'll ask for my money back since it's not doing what it purports to do.
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There is a further issue at work here, as per KB document https://kb.acronis.com/content/1689 which shows the published compatibility between different versions of ATIH and backup image files, ATIH 2016 is not compatible with your ATIH 2012 backup image and is not likely to be able to be used to open it and restore files from it.
In this case, you should sign in to your Acronis Account and download a copy of the bootable Rescue / Recovery media and use this to boot your computer or another system from with your 2012 image file attached, you should then be able to restore your data files to a separate location, such as an external hard drive as an intermediate step to moving them to your new Dell XPS system.
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Thank you, but since I first posted, my husband has opened the external drive containing the backups and copied and pasted, somewhat tediously, all the files he had backed up.
I appreciate the suggestions and information.
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