Migrating process with Acronis True Image 2013 Plus Pack

Your first steps:

Backup up the new system (full disk backup) by booting to your Acronis Rescue Media. This is your safety valve if there are problems with the migration.

Obtain the appropriate drivers for you new hardware and existing OS. (i.e. If you are running Windows 7 64 bit on your old system , you would need Windows 7 64 bit drivers for your new system hardware.) Especially important are the Chipset and hard disk controller(s). You may also want to obtain your network and video card drivers to have available after the restore for installation. These drivers need to be extracted so that they are in an uncompressed format with the resulting files as .inf, .sys, .cat, etc.

You would then need to place these drivers into a folder, or on a USB flash drive that will be available during the restore using Universal Restore from the Plus Pack. I like to make a folder called "Drivers" on the drive that contains my Acronis backup files. During the restore process when you choose the Universal Restore option, you can specify where Universal Restore looks to obtain the new driver files and point it to the "Drivers" folder.

To complete the Universal Restore:

Boot to the Acronis Rescue Media and select your full backup created on your older system. Tell Acronis to recover "Whole Disks or Partitions", selecting the Universal Restore option. Have Universal Restore look in the "Drivers" folder (or wherever you placed the drivers for your new system) and start the Restore process.

If you have never done a full disk restore, I would suggest that you take a look at Grover's guide (Thanks Grover) http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/mvp/user285/guides/tih2012… on how to perform such a recovery/restore, as it is the same with or without the Universal Restore steps. Be sure to read the information about preparation on the exiting system, esp. looking at your current Windows Disk Management drive layout. This will be key to performing the Universal Restore (or any full disk restore) successfully.

James,

Thanks for the guidance. I'm going to look at Grover's guide and make sure I'm clear about each step.

I am right in the middle of the process now. My laptop died on me yesterday due to a fan problem. Fortunately I had a full backup from a day or two prior. I made sure that I had the latest version of Acronis True Image Home 2013 with Plus Pack available.

I went out and bought a new laptop with Windows 7. I had to update it from Home Premium to Professional. I also installed all of the drivers that came with the computer. I updated antivirus just so that while I was downloading things, my downloads would be safe.

I then transferred my Acronis license onto the new computer (see ATIH 2013 above).

Next I connected each of my external USB drives that I would be needing later on for the restore. I did that so that the drivers for those devices would also load.

After that, I created my Recovery Acronis CD, knowing that I had the drivers would be included in the boot recovery disk for the external drivers.

I had already saved the new drivers from the fresh Windows install and drivers installation and put them onto a separate drive. Here is where support took it one step further. I worked with a paid support person who spent a couple of hours with me revisiting some of my steps. He went ahead and went online and got the latest drivers (not the ones that came on disk with the new computer). Those are the drivers that we used for the external drive.

Next change the boot order in the bios of the new machine to make sure that the computer boots from the recovery disk. Put that into the drive and rebooted the new machine. Connected the backup drive with my most recent backup, as well as the other external drive (could have used a jump drive too) that had the drivers for the new machine.

Here it is important to note that the new drivers cannot be in their compressed state and they must be in the proper format to run. Refer to the prior posting or the manuals.

From there, I followed the steps in the restore process. These last few steps, which I cannot be quite clear about because I cannnot see them right now, were somewhat tricky and the very reason that I called for support. However, we followed the process and now I am just waiting for my 200+ GB of data/programs to finish restoring! Supposedly it is going to run for quite some time. I'd say more than 2 hours.

In any event, if you get this far reading, I would strongly recommend that you do what I did up unto this point, or as much as possible, on your own in order to save time with support. When you have all of your drivers, backup, recovery disk, etc. ready to go, walk through it with tech support. It is well worth the pay per incident charge! Now I have to hope that mine works, otherwise I am looking at days and days to restore everything from scratch, which is what I am trying to avoid!

bocabean,
I had a fan go(disintegrated) inside my Compaq laptop and would not boot. Nose was horrible. My repair man fixed mine with a new fan. I took about an hour (mostly disassemble/reassemble time) and the fan was replaced. Total Cost was about $125.

I've been reading these comments, but I'm still not sure how to use Plus Pack to migrate to a new machine.

When I started Plus Pack, it asked for the location of WinPE. When I downloaded WinPE (KB3AIK_EN.iso) I extracted all the files and folders into a new folder I named WinPE. But Plus Pack keeps telling me the files it needs aren't in that folder.

What I want to do is migrate to a new hardware using a clone of the old machine's drive that I made with ATIH on another hard drive.

Are there any step-by-step instructions on how to do this entire process. (I understand I need to get the drivers, uncompressed, on a USB thumb drive.)

Any help or a link to a set of detailed instructions will be very much appreciated.

Confusus sum,

I did not have a good experience with Plus Pak and I eventually cancelled that service. The driver issue going from one Dell computer to another made it impossible to work. The way in which Acronis wants the drivers to exist versus the way that Dell provides them makes it almost if not completely a deal breaker.

In my case, I was starting off with a brand new laptop and the hard drive completely wiped. I installed Windows 7 Pro and then installed the drivers which I downloaded from the Dell website. I ensured that I used all of the proper drivers and installed them in the correct sequence. Some of the Dell drivers require that they be installed by the Dell Driver Installer and there was just no way to get them to the level that Acronis wanted them to be in order to load them on to a flash drive.

I spent numerous hours, in fact days on this process and I worked with a couple of Acronis tech support people. They did work very hard and were committed to trying to resolve the problem but they were unsuccessful in figuring out the driver issue. I had to re-install Windows several times and despite the fact that they wanted to "try it again", I no longer had the patience and confidence that it would succeed and I finally had to make a decision to simply re-install Windows fresh, re-install all of my application software from scratch and restore data, and other miscellaneous items from my backups. I requested that they refund me the cost of the Plus Pak, which they did.

My computer is mission critical to me and I no longer had the time to help them experiment and try this and that.

I still think that it is a great idea and concept, but for my needs, they never got the bugs worked out. I hope that you have better success.