Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus pack and restore to dissimilar hardware. Not Great!!
I bought the plus pack for TIH 2011 because I needed to restore an XP system where the motherboard had just packed up to a spare system whilst I searched for another motherboard to replace the original. This required me to restore to dissimilar hardware.
I backed up the hard drive with it installed in an external drive enclosure so that I could restore to a spare drive just in case it all went horribly wrong. Using the bootable media I tried to restore this to my spare system.
The drive image showed In 3 parts. 1) A fat 32 partition containing PcAngel which I decided I did not need to transfer, 2) The MBR and 3) The Windows Partition.
I tried to restore the image which was unsuccessful on the first couple of tries but I eventually managed to restore by just letting the restore use windows drivers and not providing any others.
I needed to manually install a couple of drivers for different hardware including the onboard audio. I decided to remove the previous cmedia audio driver via add/ remove programs but the entry remained and I just ended up with a dll error on reboot but once that was acknowledged the system went into windows o.k.
I managed to find replacement motherboard on ebay and though I could re-build the original system and be up and running with it, however the board turned out to be defective so I was still stuck with my temporary arrangement. I decided to restore the backup image to another Pc so that I could have a longer term solution whilst I searched for another motherboard.
This system had a more similar motherboard to the knackered original so I thought this would be easy but I was wrong. I restored the backup but when windows boots I now get the Microsoft “ You cannot log on until you have activated windows etc”.
Here is my dilemma :> At this point Windows has not fully booted so I don’t actually know if the restoration has been successful and whether the system is stable. If I phone to re-activate and it hasn’t worked then my licence (OEM) is now set against the new motherboard but I will be using the original system again as soon as I have sourced the replacement board.
I have spent too many hours trying to restore my original backup successfully and I am left wondering why I managed to complete the restore once without Microsoft WGA issues but cannot achieve that again even to a motherboard with more similar hardware. Does TIH move some of windows wga files on restoring rather than just copying them?
What I do know is what I thought was going to be a straight forward process wasn’t. It hasn’t totally resolved my problem and has left me with little confidence in the restore to dissimilar hardware function, (which is actually why I purchased this in the first place).
I am still within my 30days so I may ask for a refund.
If anyone has any ideas one the above or a similar experience please share the info.
Good luck
Martin
MudCrab,
I gave restoring without using UR a shot but this just ends up at the same activation prompt.
I have ordered another Original motherboard replacement and I can't wait to see what happens when I eventually get that up and running with the original hard drive. If TIH has not changed anything on it when I created the backup then this should boot straight into Windows.
I tried the restore to different hardware recently using my desktop image on the laptop. It worked far better than I thought it would. However, some software that had licence keys based on hardware configuration did need to be reactivated. That isnt a fault of TIH though. That is how these licence systems work. I used Win 7 and that doesnt suffer the same lock out that XP has on activation.
O.k Got the replacement motherboard today, 20 minutes later I am up and running with the original hard drive with no activation prompts.
I thought I would also try the hard drive I had restored the backup image on and it booted first time with no activation prompts. Now if only it had done that with the motherboard I tried with dissimilar hardware.
I did learn one trick here though, if you are having the activation issue after you have tried to restore to dissimilar hardware, restore the image again and ensure that you provide the info file for the network card and that you point TIH to the source of that info file in the setup for the restore.
Because the system won't boot into windows when you are done because of the activation screen you don' get the driver loaded, but I did find that if you start in safe mode with command prompt that windows new hardware wizard will come up and install the driver for you. This way on reboot you can connect to your router and then activate over the internet at the activation prompt.