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How Do I create a universal image

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I have about 15 laptops of various types for a small school. Id like to reload them every year, or anytime something happens like a bad HD. Dell 630, 4310s, and a couple of HPs

I have Acronis 2016 and I bought the Universal Restore.  One thing I'm missing are the steps to create the image and then restoring that image to any machine.  I remember I used to have a RIS server which was terrible for different hardware because of the HAL.  Is it just as simple as 1, 2, 3?

Create Backup.

1. Load laptop

2. Boot to Acronis

3. Create TIB image

Unviseral Restore

1. Boot to Acronis

2. Choose Universal Restore

3. Done (load drivers)

 

 

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Pretty much nailed it.  If these are all the same hardware, you don't even need to use universal restore.  Universal restore is just for generalizing the drivers on an image so that it can boot on different hardware.  

If you are using different hardware for the class, then universal restore may be needed though.

Otherwise, build your base system on one machine, boot the offline recovery media and backup up the entire hard drive and save the image somewhere else (like a network share or an external USB drive).   On the other machines, boot to the recovery media and restore the image to the internal hard drive and that should be it if they are the same hardware.  If you boot and get a BSOD, then go back and run universal restore and it should boot after that.  Dont forget to go in and switch the names of each system and reboot them too if they will be on the same network.   Unfortunately, True Image Home doesn't have a rename option during deployment - that is in their Snap Deploy or Backup 11.7 applications.

In a class environment, using the same hardware will make this go much smoother.  Differences in systems can cause a little more trouble if you have to go into the bios to switch things like UEFI to Legacy and vice versa if you have newer and old machiness.  Once you get the bios settings down, you won't need to mess with them again and things should go just fine.

Ok. Thanks. One question is on the Universal Restore Boot Disc.  Do I use that boot disc after I've RESTORED the image to different hardware?  I also have kind of a side question.  When I go to restore sometimes to a different drive. I notice that the drive if it's smaller than the drive that the image came from, it will be grayed out when I go to choose it as a destination even though the total size of the TIB image file is smaller than the destination drive.

 

 

issue 1:

Yes, you would only use UR after you've restored a backup image to a drive going into new hardware (a new computer).  The UR will generalize the drivers in the OS to factory so it should be bootable.  You may try booting the system before running UR - just to see if it actually boots - Win 10 is pretty good if you're using it.

issue 2:

The grey drive could be for a couple of reasons.

a. if it's brand new disk - initialize it in Windows first.  Alternatively, you can do this in Acronis bootable media using the 'add new disk' tool.

b. make sure the drive is formatted the same as the original.  If your image was installed on a legacy/mbr disk, if the disk is formatted GPT currently, may not have the option to restore to it.

c. in regards to b. above. Make sure you boot your recovery media in the same manner as the OS was originally installed.  The Acronis media is legacy and UEFI bootable, but you may be booting to the wrong method.  Using your boot override or one time boot menu will help make sure you boot to the correct method. 

d. you may not actually have enough space.  remember that Acronis uses compression for backups by default.  The actual size of the contents may be larger than you are expecting once they are restored.  Additional paritions will also eat up space such as manufacturer recovery partitions (some can be more than 10GB).  If the size is too close (say within 20% of what you think would fit) it may just not be big enough.  Also make sure you didn't take a sector-by-sector image orignally as that will backup the entire disk and not just the written data - there are few times where sector-by-sector would actually be useful.

 

Thanks for the information.  I figured that might be the issue with the hard drive size.  The size of the TIB file is 39 GB and the size of the hard drive is 78 GB. 

BTW. I was a 2E271.  1997-2005