Failed restore with ATIH V11.0 (build 8,101) on Dell XPS with ISRT

I see only a couple of threads on this but they seem to focus on Win8. I have a dell xps that has a 750gb regular hard drive and a 32GB SSD for Intel smart response technology. Basically, the 32GB is a hibernation partition for fast sleep/hibernation functions as I understand it.

My ATIH V11.0 has been fairly dependable, sans restoring encrypted drives (McAfee). I installed ATIH first once I got the laptop, and did an image. I always do this to just make things go faster for recovery, and doing multi-snapshots depending how far or later I need to go back on full image restore (just to save me time re-downloading and resintalling apps).

however, i get an error that says Linux kernel cannot be found at bootup. ATIH seems to only boot up if I set the BIOS from ISRT to AHCI (not ata). I believe I tried it using ATA also and I was able to get in and start restoration process. but when it tries to boot, it says cannot find boot kernel. It does this whether staying in ATA and AHCI or switching back to ISRT. (I created the flash drive boot disk from w/in the new image thinking all relevant drivers for the machine would be installed.

Any ideas how this can work? I was informed thru another forum that my ATIH version won't work since it's too old and if the BIOS has UEFI (which I see but not enabled since I'm on Win7, not Win8).

I was able to compare how Acronis sees the drives. the first snapshot below is from the first install and out of the box setup. the second one after using Dell recovery. I found strange the recovery does not re-create the 32GB ISRT partition. I deleted this and kept on getting error later form w/in the OS that it's missing ISRT. So had to manually re-create it.

The weird part about the snapshots is that the original had MBR info, whereas the second one does not. But it still boots fine. I wonder what I lost and Dell didn't seem to know.

http://smg.photobucket.com/user/goldenset/media/original_zpsed33d6d0.pn…

http://smg.photobucket.com/user/goldenset/media/after_reimage_zps94f456…

It is also strange that the dell recovery cd's used a fat32 partition later instead of the out of the box fat16.

So is my ATIH V11 really outdated it cannot work with modern setups like ISRT? The restore seemed to work but it just won't boot when it restarts (and boot flash drive is removed of course).