Cloning to a new Hard Drive
Just bought my first copy of True Image, so I'm a real newby. I have a machine that is slowly dying, and I want to image its hard drive onto a replacement computer. I installed True Image on my laptop, but I am not clear on how to connect and make an image of the computer that needs replacing. Please offer some hints or links to help me out.

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Timothy, welcome to these user forums.
What you are looking to do is not a simple matter of just cloning your old, dying computer hard drive and moving this to a new replacement computer, there is a whole lot more involved that just doing that!
What version of Windows OS is running on your dying computer?
What license do you have for the Windows OS - is this a Microsoft full Retail license, or an OEM license?
What hardware does that computer have? What types of disk drives, drive controllers etc?
What version of Windows OS will be on the new computer? What type of license?
What hardware in the new one, what types of disk drives, controllers etc?
To migrate your existing Windows OS from the old computer to a new one will require the use of Acronis Universal Restore in order to prepare the old OS to work with the new hardware that your new computer contains. This is possible to do but requires a degree of compatibility between the old and new computers for it to work successfully.
If you have an OEM version of Windows OS on the old computer, i.e. one that came with such as a Dell, HP, Lenovo etc computer, then this cannot be moved to a new computer as is tied to the hardware where it was activated. You would either need a license for the same OS on the new computer activated on that hardware, or to purchase a new license.
Older computer tend to have SATA disk drives that operate in AHCI controller mode but newer computers may operate their disk drive(s) in RAID mode (even for a single disk drive) and may have newer types of disk drive such as NVMe, M.2 or PCIe drives.
Older computers may use Legacy BIOS / MBR partitioning for booting into Windows - newer computers tend to use UEFI / Secure Boot and can use GPT partitioning to boot into Windows. To migrate an old computer if these things are different would require that the new computer support booting in Legacy / CSC mode with Secure Boot disabled.
In principle, the process to do what you ask would be as follows:
- Make a full disk & partitions backup of the old computer OS boot drive and store this on an external backup drive.
- Make the Acronis Rescue Media and Universal Restore media on USB sticks or CD/DVD media.
- Boot the new computer from the Acronis Rescue Media, with the external backup drive connected.
- Restore the backup image from the old computer to the new computer internal disk drive.
- Shutdown the new computer, replace the Rescue Media with the Universal Restore media and boot from this.
- Select the restore Windows OS and let Universal Restore prepare this for use on this new hardware.
Note: AUR may prompt that additional device drivers are needed for new hardware found in the new computer that was not present in the old one. You should ensure that you can download and provide any of these from the Support web site for the new computer manufacturer. - Assuming all goes well, shutdown, remove all boot media, external drives etc.
- Attempt to boot the new computer from the migrated Windows OS and let it find any further drivers for new hardware found.
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Steve Smith, I agree with your advice, a very informative post. The third point drew my attention. I'm going to buy such one Samsung SE-218CB/RSBS, about the characteristics here I have noticed for a long time that they help to avoid problems with back up especially when installing Windows or image like this. This is not the answer many of you were hoping to hear, but its an option to consider. So I hope not to experience the same problems when installing.
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Hi Steve,
Thanks for this helpful post. Sorry to wake up an old thread, but I have a question: What if the new and old drives are in the same machine? That is, the new drive will be a replacement for the old drive. Does this simplify things concerning OEM drives, legacy booting and controller modes?
Thanks for any insight.
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Philo, welcome to these User Forums.
If you are just replacing an old drive with a new one in the same machine, then there should be no issues providing both drives will be connected in the same way, i.e. both SATA drives and connected to the same port (ideally) on the motherboard.
Acronis Universal Restore is only required when there is a change in basic hardware components such as motherboard, CPU etc.
Replacing an existing drive with a new one in the same computer is simply a matter of either restoring a backup of the old drive to the new one, or else cloning the old drive to the new one. Personally, the first option would be my recommendation as it leaves less room for mistakes, especially when using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media for this process.
The boot mode of the Acronis Rescue Media should always match that used by your Windows OS, this can be confirmed by using the msinfo32 tool and check what is shown for BIOS mode.
See KB 59877: Acronis True Image 2017: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media for help with understanding this aspect of recovery.
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In risposta a Philo, welcome to these User… di truwrikodrorow…
