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This should be a basic task I want to complete: I want to take an image of a bare bones windows 10 enterprise laptop, and restore that image onto an identical laptop (identical hard drive).

I have never used Acronis software so I downloaded the 2017 trial version.

Using the back up tool I created an .tib file, and then created a bootable USB using the rescue media builder tool.

I then booted into this USB on the identical laptop and I can see the steps I need to do to restore my image. 

The problem is that Acronis did not detect my laptops hard drive.

My first question is, is this possible and am I using the right steps to backup an image and restore it on another laptop?

I have tried using the universal restore tool but it was too complicated for me to create a bootable USB from the tool, it kept giving me an error. (I didn't know what windows drivers to add to the USB).

Any advice would be helpful, otherwise I will just have to manually reinstall windows and set up each laptop.

Thanks

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Chris, welcome to these user forums.

In principle what you want to do should be straight-forward to do, but there a number of issues that need to be addressed.

The trial version of the software has a number of limitations (by virtue of being only a trial version), this includes limitations of how the Rescue Media can be used and no ability to use Acronis Universal Restore.  See KB 2768: Trial Version Limitations of Acronis Products

You say that your two laptops are identical - are you 100% sure that this is the case?  Any significant differences in the internal hardware may require the use of Acronis Universal Restore to prepare the second laptop to be able to run the restored OS from the first one.

The standard Acronis Rescue Media (that you created on USB stick) is a Linux OS based distribution that has limited support for some very recent disk drives, so if your laptop has NVMe or M.2 SSD drives, you will need to create the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media for these to be visible from the Rescue Media.

Another important point is how the Rescue Media is started - this must match the way that your Windows OS starts, i.e. if Windows boots via the EFI bootloader then you must boot the Rescue Media in the same mode.

Finally, Windows OS licenses - if your laptops both have the same version of Windows OS installed, then this shouldn't be an issue provided that you can reactivate the restore Windows OS on the second laptop.  This is easier with Windows 10, particularly if the activation is based on the hardware signature of the computer.  If you have OEM versions of Windows then these are not transferable to different hardware but you should still be OK if both laptops are licensed / activated for the same Windows OS version.

Thank you very much for the helpful advice.

The laptop's hard drives are M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drives.

Unfortunately, my company is very small (5 laptops) and I have spent a fair amount of time already and I don't like having to find out which windows drivers I need in order to create that WinPE USB. If we buy the license for the software, do you know if the process will become easier? 

If you don't mind my asking as well, are there any alternatives where I would have a faster time backing up/restoring my windows image?

Again, thank you for your time.

 

Chris, if your computers are as identical as you have stated, then you should not need any additional device drivers for the WinPE USB stick, though if you want an easy way to create this and include extra drivers, then click on the link in my signature for the MVP Tool - Custom ATI WINPE Builder which will allow you to inject the Intel RST drivers that are needed if your NVMe drive is using RAID by default..

The WinPE really only needs basic drivers for hard drives and Nics.  Hard drives are easy, Nics are easy.  RAID is what gets you as these laptops probably are using RAID as the SATA mode.

The generic IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) drivers should work on most RAID, unless the systems are using custom LSI controllers, but probably aren't.  

With your trial version.  Use our MVP winpe builder tool (linked in Steve's post and this one) and build  the winpe with it (you will need to download and install the Windows 10 ADK 1511 or 1607 on the system you will be building the winpe with first - also linked in this post below.  select the 1st 3 items - 3.4Gb) and after that, just run our tool and it will do the rest for you - just follow the prompts to build 64-bit winpe).  

Then boot it up and act like you're going to back up.  It should let you pick a hard drive (even though it won't let you backup in trial).  If you can see the drives, you're good to go.  It should work fine on 99% of any laptops you purchase as well after that.