Acronis True Image Home 2010 Plus Pack Universal Restore chipset drivers and pci.sys file

Hi. I have recently purchased and used the Acronis True Image Home 2010 Plus Pack Universal Restore to replace a motherboard in one of my Windows XP Home PCs. There was not a lot of forum information on my questions so I am attempting to share some of my lessons learned.

Chipset drivers: On another PC, I turned on the Acronis "Try & Decide" feature, which allows me to use this PC to help extract drivers and then revert it back to original without worry of what I left behind :) - If a person moves the Intel chipset driver to the C: root drive, opens a session of DOS, and executes the file with a "-A" modifier, the drivers will be extracted and put into a single directory as opposed to being integrated into the system. Turning off Acronis Try & Decide puts the PC back to its stated before gathering drivers :)

Backup Image: I usually divide my back up images into DVD size. In my situation the Universal restore plug-in wanted my backup image to be one big file. I had to make a one file image from the hard drive when it was not the primary drive.

PCI.SYS at 0 bytes: Windows would not boot up because my "...pci.sys file was missing or corrupt..." It was there, but was 0 bytes. I suspect this happened with I made the image of the HDD when it was not primary, because I was able to transfer the PCI.sys (& pciidex.sys) files from my two file image backup using the Acronis File Restore feature. One stumbling block here is to turn off the "..do not overwrite newer file..." setting.

Partitions: My original HDD was two partitions (C: / D:) with D: being the OEM recovery files. Since these files would not work anymore with my dissimilar hardware, I did not transfer D: drive which allowed me to bypass the situation where Universal Restore was wanting to make the FAT D: drive as C: drive. I could not see how to change this, but realized I did not need to worry about it.

MBR & 0 Track: I read in the forums where I did not need to write this to the new drive. I did it both ways in my efforts to troubleshoot problems, but I lost track of what I did the last time and I am too chicken to mess with my present success.

This seemed to be the most helpful overview of the process forum entry. http://forum.acronis.com/content/5410