Can I expect success restoring Acronis full disk image
Created full_PC true image file of 1T HD my old Gateway, W10 with Acronis 2018. 2 days later, computer crashed, motherboard issues. Purchased new Acer with 2T drive. New drive only has Win10 Home( OEM digital license) on it. The original HD is OK, it has all my data, I can easily move the data to new HD. My goal is to restore my programs as well as my data. If I use Acronis to restore the full_PC image of the old drive to the new drive, do I have a reasonable chance of success? Will I be overwriting the W10 files? Not sure how this will all work out
Christopher, welcome to these public User Forums.
Please see KB 19296: Acronis products cannot be used to transfer applications to different system or upgrade OS
If you attempt to migrate your Windows 10 OS from your old failed computer drive backup, then there are a number of considerations you need to take account of.
What version of Windows 10 was on the old computer, if this is not Windows 10 Home, then you will see some activation issues as your new computer hardware only has Win 10 Home.
How did Windows 10 boot in terms of the BIOS mode used? If the old computer used Legacy / MBR for booting, then this is very likely to be different that the new computer which I would expect to use UEFI with GPT, so there will need to be a migration from Legacy/MBR to UEFI/GPT done here too.
What type of disk drives are involved here? Does the new computer have the same type of drive as you had in the old computer, i.e. both using SATA drives? If your old computer had a SATA drive but the new one has such as a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD drive, then additional device drivers will be needed.
Other considerations include how your applications are activated - if any use the hardware signature of the computer where they were installed & activated, then this too will need to be resolved after migrating those applications to completely different hardware.
Any restore / recovery of your Acronis backup image from the old computer to the new one will wipe the hard disk of the target system as one of the first actions, so it will wipe out all trace of the installed Win 10 Home OS. I would strongly recommend making a full disk backup of the new computer before attempting any migration here.
Steve is dead on. Keeping in mind you can't transfer just programs and would need to recover an entire disk image, it would be relatively safe to try if:
1) Backup the new computer hard drive in the current and original state for safe keeping and/or as recovery safety point (just in case). Should be able to recover with that backup as is" if need be so that you have the original factory setup again.
Even better, pull the original drive in the new PC and hold onto it for safe keeping "as is", but also take a backup. You can always pop in the original drive and play with a backup drive to test things out.
2) Boot the new PC and ensure Windows is activated to the hardware - this is a must as licensing for Windows 10 is all done remote with Microsoft and is hardware based. When you restore any Windows 10 image to the hardware, if it has never been registered with Microsoft before, it won't activate from a backup image. The backup restored image needs to match the version that the new computer came with too (home = home or Pro = Pro). You can't go from Pro to Home or Home to Pro and expect it to just license on the new hardware.
3) Restore the full system backup image of the old system to to the new one now (assuming Windows versions match) and hopefully using a different disk if possible. Windows 10 is pretty good with handling drivers. Where you might run into issues is bios settings (legacy/MBR vs UEFI/GPT and what the new system supports - many new systems don't support MBR/legacy, or need to have it enabled if they do).