Acronis Backup: Restoring to Dissimilar Hardware with Universal Restore – Support Latam

You need to use Acronis Universal Restore to recover the system backup of one machine to another one with dissimilar hardware.

This article applies to:

Acronis Backup 11.5 prior to Update 5 (Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5)
Acronis Backup 11.5 Build 43916
Acronis Backup 11.5 Build 43956
Acronis Backup 11.5 Build 43994
Acronis Backup (Advanced) 11.7 Build 44397
Acronis Backup 12, 12.5
Acronis Backup Cloud

Introduction

Acronis Universal Restore is the Acronis proprietary technology that helps recover and boot up an operating system on dissimilar hardware or a virtual machine. Universal Restore handles differences in devices that are critical for the operating system start-up, such as storage controllers, motherboard or chipset.

Universal Restore is extremely useful in the following scenarios:

Instant recovery of a failed system on different hardware.
Hardware-independent cloning and deployment of operating systems.
Physical-to-physical, physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical machine migration.

Acronis Universal Restore is a module that allows changing Windows Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL.dll) and install mass storage boot device drivers into the system.

It installs boot device drivers (eg hard drive or RAID controller drivers) into the system during the recovery process, so that the operating system can boot from this boot device. If there are proper NIC drivers present in the folder with the drivers, Acronis Universal Restore will copy them into the restored system and will schedule their installation on Windows boot-up.

(!) Do not use Windows\System32\drivers folder as drivers source.

(!) All the other drivers (eg video and sound card drivers, plug and play drivers) are not installed by Acronis Universal Restore, as they can be installed in Windows after the successful migration.

Solution

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Prepare drivers

Before applying Universal Restore to a Windows operating system, make sure that you have the drivers for the new HDD controller and the chipset. These drivers are critical to start the operating system. Use the CD or DVD supplied by the hardware vendor or download the drivers from the vendor's Web site. The driver files should have the *.inf, *.sys or *.oem extensions. If you download the drivers in the *.exe, *.cab or *.zip format, extract them using a third-party application (eg free 7-zip tool or any other).

The best practice is to store drivers for all the hardware used in your organization in a single repository sorted by device type or by the hardware configurations. You can keep a copy of the repository on a DVD or a flash drive; pick some drivers and add them to the bootable media; create the custom bootable media with the necessary drivers (and the necessary network configuration) for each of your servers. Or, you can simply specify the path to the repository every time Universal Restore is used.

Note for Windows XP users: as Microsoft has stopped Windows XP support on April 8, 2014 , more and more hardware manufacturers discontinue testing their harware for compatibility with Windows XP, thus you may experience issues when/after restoring a Windows XP system to new hardware. Please consult your hardware manufacturer to make sure the new hardware is compatible with Windows XP.

Check access to the drivers in bootable environment

Make sure you have access to the device with drivers when working under bootable media. Even if you configure system disk recovery in a Windows environment, the machine will reboot and recovery will proceed in the Linux-based environment. Use WinPE-based media if the device is available in Windows but Linux-based media does not detect it.

What if you do not have drivers

Windows 7 includes more drivers than the older Windows operating systems. There is a great chance that Universal Restore finds all necessary drivers in the Windows 7 driver folder. So, you may not necessarily have to specify the external path to the drivers. Nevertheless, performing Universal Restore is critical so the system uses the correct drivers.

The Windows default driver storage folder is determined in the registry value DevicePath, which can be found in the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion .

This storage folder is usually WINDOWS/inf.

HideRecuperaciónHide Recovery

Boot the target machine with Acronis bootable media.
Once loaded, select Acronis Backup:

Acronis Backup Acronis Backup Cloud

(!) You can select 32-bit or 64-bit media. The 32-bit media can work on 32-bit and 64-bit hardware. You need 64-bit components to boot a machine that uses Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).
For Acronis Backup Cloud, click Manage this machine locally . For Acronis Backup, skip this step.
Click Recover :
Click Select data in What to recover :
Click Browse to browse for backup location.
After selecting backup location, go to the Archive view tab, and select the backup archive that you want to restore. In the Backup contents section select the partitions or disks that you want to recover. When you are ready, click OK.
Check that the settings are correct.
Universal Restore for Windows should be set to Use .

If you have Acronis Backup 12 : perform the recovery first, then boot the machine once again with Acronis bootable media, select Acronis Universal Restore and apply it as described below.

Specify a location where Acronis Universal Restore should search for drivers for the new system (Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), HDD controller driver and network adapter drivers).
- If the drivers are on a CD/DVD or another removable media, set Search removable media to On .
- If the drivers are on a network location or on external drive, click Add folder and specify the folder with drivers.
- Specify drivers for mass storage controllers only if automatic driver search does not help to boot the system. Specify the appropriate drivers by clicking Add driver .
Review the details and click OK to start the operation.