Acronis Universal Restore General Principles; Acronis Universal Restore And Microsoft Sysprep; Limitations In Using Acronis Universal Restore - ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE ECHO - SERVER FOR WINDOWS User Manual

3.6.2 Acronis Universal Restore general principles

1. Automatic HAL and mass storage drivers selection
Acronis Universal Restore searches the Windows default driver storage folders (in the
image being restored) for HAL and mass storage device drivers and installs drivers that
better fit the target hardware. You can specify a custom driver repository (a folder or
folders on a network drive or CD) which will also be used for drivers search.
The Windows default driver storage folder is determined in the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current version\DevicePath. This
storage folder is usually WINDOWS/inf.
2. Manual selection of 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
Acronis Universal Restore relies on 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.

3.6.3 Acronis Universal Restore and Microsoft Sysprep

Acronis Universal Restore is
image created by Acronis products, including images prepared with Microsoft System
Preparation Tool (Sysprep). The following is an example of using both tools on the same
system.
Acronis Universal Restore does not strip 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 restore, if need
be, using Acronis Universal Restore.

3.6.4 Limitations in using Acronis Universal Restore

1. The system recovered by Acronis Universal Restore might not start if the partition
structure in the image or the target disk partitioning does not coincide with that of the
source disk. As a result, the loader, restored from the image, will point to the wrong
partition and the system will not boot or will malfunction.
Such might be the case if you:
- image only selected partitions but not the entire source disk
Keep in mind, that the source disk may have a hidden maintenance partition created by
the computer vendor. Therefore, if you check each partition for backup instead of
checking the disk, this hidden partition will not be included into the image.
- restore not the entire source disk, but only the selected partitions. In some cases,
especially if your system resides on a partition other than the first, this can confuse the
loader and prevent the restored system from startup.
To avoid the problem, we recommend that you image and restore the entire system disk.
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a system preparation tool. You can apply it to any system
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