ACRONIS BACKUP AND RECOVERY 10 ADVANCED SERVER - UPDATE 3 User Manual page 54

The Universal Restore technology provides an efficient solution for hardware-independent system
recovery by replacing the crucial Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and mass storage device drivers.
Universal Restore is applicable for:
1. Instant recovery of a failed system on different hardware.
2. Hardware-independent cloning and deployment of operating systems.
3. Physical-to-physical, physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-physical machine migration.
The Universal Restore principles
1. Automatic HAL and mass storage driver selection.
Universal Restore searches for drivers in the network folders you specify, on removable media
and in the default driver storage folders of the system being recovered. Universal Restore
analyzes the compatibility level of all found drivers and installs HAL and mass storage drivers that
better fit the target hardware. Drivers for network adapters are also searched and passed to the
operating system which installs them automatically when first started.
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.
2. Manual selection of the mass storage device driver.
If the target hardware has a specific mass storage controller (such as a SCSI, RAID, or Fibre
Channel adapter) for the hard disk, you can install the appropriate driver manually, bypassing the
automatic driver search-and-install procedure.
3. Installing drivers for Plug and Play devices.
Universal Restore relies on the built-in Plug and Play discovery and configuration process to
handle hardware differences in devices that are not critical for the system start, such as video,
audio and USB. Windows takes control over this process during the logon phase, and if some of
the new hardware is not detected, you will have a chance to install drivers for it later manually.
Universal Restore and Microsoft Sysprep
Universal Restore is not a system preparation tool. You can apply it to any Windows image created
by Acronis products, including images of systems prepared with Microsoft System Preparation Tool
(Sysprep). The following is an example of using both tools on the same system.
Universal Restore does not strip the security identifier (SID) and user profile settings in order to run
the system immediately after recovery without re-joining the domain or re-mapping network user
profiles. If you are going to change the above settings on a recovered system, you can prepare the
system with Sysprep, image it and recover, if need be, using the Universal Restore.
Limitations
Universal Restore is not available:

when a computer is booted with Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (using F11) or
 the backup image is located in the Acronis Secure Zone or
 when using Acronis Active Restore,
because these features are primarily meant for instant data recovery on the same machine.
Universal Restore is not available when recovering Linux.
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