Aller au contenu principal

Making clone of a PC help please!

Thread needs solution

Hello,

 

I purchased Acronis True Image Premium 2014 a couple of years ago for the the purpose of cloning a PC in the case that it ever broke down I could buy a new PC and effectively setup a new clone of the original PC.

The reason being that the PC in question has some important software on it, which I no longer have the installation files for.

I now have a new PC that I am looking to make a clone of the original PC onto, the original PC is still working.

I have a disk I made in 2014 labelled "Acronis True Image Premium 2014 - Bootable Media", plus an external hard drive labelled "PC image". Which I believe is logically the installation utility and the backup of the old PC.

My questions are:

  • Does the software I have allow me to achieve what I am hoping to do, effectively clone a previous machine to a new machine?  
  • What is the process of cloning this backup up information the new PC?

When I say new PC, they are both of the Windows XP era. The one I am looking to migrate to is relatively newer but more importantly more powerful.

Thanks in advance.

0 Users found this helpful

Andrew, welcome to these user forums.

Unfortunately, making a clone and moving your current system OS & programs to a different system are two quite different things.

The clone part is fairly easy when this is being done on the same system where the new 'cloned' drive will work with exactly the same hardware.

To do what you are wanting to do, i.e. move your old OS & programs from your original PC to a whole new PC is a more complicated task altogether.

You will most likely need to have the Acronis Universal Restore media available in order to prepare your original OS on the new PC to allow it to be able to boot.

The ability to directly move the original PC backup image and use it on the new PC depends on their being common factors between the two systems, i.e. do they both use the same boot load method - older PC's tend to use BIOS / MBR boot methods, newer PC's are more likely to use UEFI / Secure Boot bootloader - if so, then you would need to check that your new PC can boot in Legacy mode to support the BIOS / MBR boot method.

You also need to check other factors such as how the drive is connected in the two PC's - SATA, AHCI, RAID.

This is doable but probably not by using the Clone method.

Ideally, you should make a full backup of the new PC before doing anything - assuming this comes pre-installed with Windows - so that you have a way to get back to square one.

Next, make a full backup of the original PC.

Boot from your Acronis bootable Rescue Media on the new PC and ensure that this can see your new PC hard drive plus your backup drive holding the backup you will be restoring.  If all is good, then restore that backup to the new PC.

Boot from the Acronis Universal Restore Media on the new PC and allow it to prepare the restored drive to boot - you may still need to provide additional device drivers for any hardware in the new PC that prevents it booting into Windows.

Assuming that all the above goes without a problem, then you still have the question about Windows Activation with moving your old PC OS to the new PC.  Unless you either have Windows 10 of the same edition on both PC's or have a full Retail version of Windows OS from your old PC, then you will need to purchase a new OS license.  OEM versions of Windows cannot be moved to different hardware.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the welcome and prompt, detailed reply.

Is Acronis Universal Restore Media a seperate program or an option within the software?   I am sure I remember seeing this when creating the image from the original PC, which gave me the impression I could migrate this data to a different machine and it would find and install drivers for devices that are critical for the operating system start-up, such as storage controllers, motherboard, or chipset.

Ok- to summarise:

1. Make a full backup of both PC's.

2. Boot from the Acronis bootable Rescue Media on the new PC and ensure that this can see the new PC hard drive plus the backup drive holding the backup I will be restoring.  If all is good, then restore that backup to the new PC.

3. Boot from the Acronis Universal Restore Media on the new PC and allow it to prepare the restored drive to boot - I may still need to provide additional device drivers for any hardware in the new PC that prevents it booting into Windows.

4. Windows activation, I have a serial for windows XP for both machines. So I should be good?

As an alternative route, as I am just looking to run the program, if I was just to add a clone of the original PC's harddrive as an additional drive to the new PC, would the programs still run?

 

 

 

Andrew, 

Please see KB document: 47792: Acronis True Image 2014 Premium Update 3: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware for details about Universal Restore.

With regard to your alternative approach, if you create a clone of the original PC drive on a spare disk drive and install this as a second drive in the new PC, then you would still need to be able to boot the Windows OS from that second drive in order to access and run any programs from it.

This could work if your new PC BIOS settings would allow you to select to boot from that second drive and you can overcome any differences in PC hardware components used during the booting process.  I would still recommend booting from the Acronis Universal Restore media to prepare the cloned drive but I would recommend disconnecting or removing the new PC main boot drive before doing so, to make sure that AUR doesn't change anything on that drive.

Please see post: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/123986 from another user with a similar request to yours.