Universal Restore from system disk out of computer that already died?
I just had a motherboard die out from under me, and will need a new one. Unfortunately, I don't think I have a recent enough image of the system disk to bother doing a restore from, it would probably be almost as easy to do a new install. My question is, would it be possible to plug the system disk from that computer into a spare system, and install True Image on the temporary computer and make an image that I could do a Universal Restore onto the new motherboard from? Or is it possible that True Image could just restore directly from the disk to a new one?
The system that died had True Image 2013 installed on it, but I don't remember ever adding the Plus Pack to it, so I will probably need to upgrade True Image. From what I read it appears True Image 2016 can do the Universal Restore without any extra packs added, is that correct?
Thanks,
Dave
Bobbo,
Thanks for the tips, especially about using a third hard drive to preserve the original. (I couldn't count with my shoes and socks off how many times I've sat here thinking "Gee, I shoulda made a copy first.") I do have a disk laying here that has "Acronis True Image bootable" written on it, so hopefully it has all the recovery stuff on it I will need. I just got the new MB and power supply ordered, so that will give me a few days to think about how I'm going to do it.
Thanks,
Dave
Glad to help. FYI, I'm not sure about 2013 (can't remember now), but 2014 had UR incorporated directly in it. In 2015/2106, the UR restore .iso is actually seperate from the ATIH recovery media. However, once you're back up and running, you can use the Universal Restore Media Creator (it's an add-on) from Windows to build recovery media that will have ATIH and UR in one disc... better yet a single USB flash drive if you have one available.
Bobbo, as near as I can tell from searching the Acronis web site, 2013 required an extra purchase of a plus pack to get the universal restore, and I can't find any evidence of it still being available. Searches find lots of documentation about it, but no download or purchase links. So it looks like upgrade to 2016 is my only option. And if my 3013 qualifies for what I have seen as the upgrade price for 2016, it's not so bad. and the spare computer I'm using right now is Win 10, which I believe requires 2016. And if I get the Win 7 computer successfully resurected, the plan is to upgrade it to 10 while the upgrade is still free. (As soon as I finish learning my way around it.)
Yes, you will have to upgrade to 2016 at this point.
Also, do a backup copy of the computer you will restore the image to. This way you can restore it if the Universal Restore process goes wrong.
Restore a Win 7 image to a Win 10 computer can be complicated by the change of disk setup (from MBR/BIOS boot disk typical with Win 7, to GPT/UEFI boot disk setup more common with recent Win 10 computers). Verify what setup you have with your Win 10 computer (you can use Windows disk management to determine this).
Also, you will have to verify that you can find Win 7 drivers for the hardware of your Win 10 computer. This shouldn't be an issue, but who knows...
Dave,
Thanks for jogging my memory, you are correct. I had the plus pack and see it in my pucrhases. Without the plus pack, you could not do bare metal recovery to different systems so it would require having a newer version these days to get the bare metal restore feature. In 2014, you had to purchase "premium" to get that feature as well, but it was a single license then. In 2015 and 2016 - it is part of the license, even if you don't get the Cloud features.
You should qualify for any upgrade using your older 2013 license though. Basically, you would buy an "upgrade" for 2016. Install it fresh on a computer and when you register the new license, you'll then be prompted for your old key and it should license just fine after that. Looks like Acronis is offering an additional free license with the purchaes of a single license or upgrade licesnse as well so you could get a 2fer. They have different deals all the time though. I just sent you PM
Pat,
I have just purchased and downloaded the upgrade. As far as restoring the Win 7 image to a Win 10 computer, that's not an issue, it's 2 seperate computers I'm dealing with. The Win 10 is just a spare computer I'm using until I get the Win 7 restored with a new motherboard. And as far as drivers, the computer I'm testing Win 10 on is an old one that was given to me last year after a friend replaced it, and Dell claimed it won't run anything newer than Win 7 (or was it Vista?) and wouldn't let me download newer drivers for it, yet 8.1 happily installed with the drivers included with Win, and ran for a couple of months until I upgraded it to 10.
Dave
Dave,
On each computer do the following:
- launch the windows disk management console (you can search for 'manage computer")
- in the View menu, choose top > disks
- compare the 2 pictures: if all disks are MBR, your situation is simple. You will just need the Win 7 drivers of the Win 10 computer that used to run Win 7. You might find these in an old system backup of that computer in the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers and C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Drivers folders. Oor donwload them from Dell and unpack them to their *inf and *sys file formats. YOu will need these files to be available to the restore process. (a simple way to do that is to copy these files to a USB stick plugged into the computer during the UR phase of the restore
Pat,
I can't run the management console on both computers, because the Win 7 is already dead, (bad power supply zapped the motherboard,) but I do know all drives are MBR.
I'm having trouble understanding why I need the Win 7 drivers for the Win 10 computer. you seem to be directing me to restoring 7 back onto the 10 computer, and that is not what I am doing. I am just restoring 7 back to where it was, but with a new motherboard unrneath it. The only reason ther is even another computer in this discussion is that the motherboard died before I could get a True Image backup of the system, so I am having to put the OS disk in another system to make an image to work with. hopefully the CD that came with the new board will have Win 7 drivers, but will I need to copy them to a USB stick to have them during the restore?
Dave
Dave,
Just take the image of the original drive and push it to another one (so you have the original - just in case).
Push the image to the new drive.
Place new drive in system with new mobo.
Boot to UR now
Should detect OS on drive. Generalize the buiild with UR - don't add any drivers.
Windows should boot after that.
Install new drivers as needed in Windows.
Thanks, Bobbo. That was the way I was thinking. I borrowad 2 spare drives from work that are the same size as the one out of the dead computer so I can clone it and have a spare copy just in case something goes wrong as it often does. Fortunately, the OS and data were on seperate disks, so the data can stay safely out of the process.
The FedEx man brought the new hardware to me at work this afternoon, so I will probably have an excuse not to accomplish any usefull work this weekend. I'll post back after it is all done. (Or beg for more help if it doesn't go as planned.)
Dave
Roger that. the only other things I can think for you to look out for are:
1) make sure your bios SATA settings are the same (SATA, AHCI, or RAID)
2) If it comes with secure boot on, turn it off
3) If your system was built as legacy/bios/csm - you'll want ot make sure that's enabled on your new mobo too - if it supports both at the same time, should not be an issue.
Bobbo,
I thought I had it about figured out, but I have one more question. I have cloned the original drive so I have an emergency copy, but that's not the "image" you were saying to push to the new computer, is it? Do I need to take a True Image "backup" image to restore to the new computer?
I've gone about as far as I can tonight anyway, I've run into a small hardware snag. All the CD and DVD drives I have around are IDE, and the new mobo has no IDE connectors. I think there may be a spare SATA DVD ROM at work I can borrow tomorrow to use until I can get the new Blu-Ray burner I've been promising myself.
Dave
Dave,
If the clone worked, that should be fine. Personally (and this is just my preference), I have never used the "clone" feature. Cloning should create an exact duplicate of the original drive to the new one - which is the ultimate goal. However, if done incorrectly, one could reverse the source and destination disks in the process and accidentally overwrite the original data. Plus, as a rule of thumb (for me), before I make any major changes, I always take a backup. If anything goes wrong, you can then restore the backup to any of your other drives. Who knows, perhaps during a clone there's a power outage or something and both drives go Tango Uniform. It's not wrong to clone, I just try to give myself the best chances of recovery so I always take an image and restore from it. Even in the cloning gudie, Acronis recommends taking an image first:
FAQ about backup, recovery and cloning
- What is the best way to migrate the system to a new disk: cloning or backup and recovery? - The backup and recovery method provides more flexibility. In any case, we strongly recommend to make a backup of your old hard disk even if you decide to use cloning. It could be your data saver if something goes wrong with your original hard disk during cloning. For example, there were cases when users chose the wrong disk as the target and thus wiped their system disk. In addition, you can make more than one backup to create redundancy and increase security.
OK, it's finally done, and seems to be up and running OK. I ran into a few minor glitches along the way, but got them straightened out. After having to borrow a DVD ROM from work because the new motherboard didn't have an IDE plug to use any of the drives I had, (it gave me an excuse to order a new Blu-Ray burner, which is on the way) I then ran into a problem that Universal Restore couldn't see the USB mouse and keyboard. I did a search on the forum and found MANY threads on this problem, going back at least as far as 2009 that I saw, and as recently as last month, and all with the same workarounds. Use "force_modules=usbhid" parameter, (didn't work for me) or use EinPE media (I looked into that and deciced it was complicated enough it would be easier to just reinstall Windoze.) Incredibly, the most common suggestion, which was the only one that worked for me was to go get a PS/2 mouse. I say incredible because of how long it's been since new hardware has not included PS/2 ports. My new motherboard has a single PS/2 port which is colored half green and half purple, and can be used either for a mouse or a keyboard but not both. I had a PS/2 keyboard but the Tab key would only cycle through the 3 buttons at the top of the page, but I couldn't get to the "Continue" button at the bottom. I finally had to drive back to the old house I'm moving out of and found a PS/2 mouse that had been left behind. Given the lack of PS/2 ports nowdays, I think this is something that really needs fixed. In fact several of the threads from a few years ago claimed it had been fixed "in the next update" but this is the latest build I just downloaded from Acronis a few days ago.
Universal Restore asked for a driver during the process I couldn't find to give it, (such a long file name I can't remember what it was, but it included PCI inthe name, and I didn't have anything plugged into the single PCI slot) so I just told UR to ignore it, and after Windoze started I put in the driver disk from the new board and all seems to be happy now.
Shortly after it was going, Windoze informed me it needed a string of updates. Not sure if something new got installed in the process that needed updates, or if some updates got stripped in the process. Or is it possible that the old system had died before Patch Tuesday?
The during the after-update reboot, it hung shutting down (about a half hour saying it was logging off) and I finally had to go for the power switch, but after a couple more reboots to mak sure, it seems to be OK now.
Thanks for all the help from the forum, especially Bobbo. Now the fun part, to see how much change in performance I get. Even though the processer on the new board only increased from 3.0 to 3.3 GHz, it did increase from 2 cores (Pentium D) to 8 cores.
Dave