OVERVIEW

Basic overview of the article

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 installs mass storage boot device drivers into the system.

It installs boot device drivers (e.g. 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 (e.g. 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.

Step1:

Log in to the Acronis Account.
Download the Acronis Boot Media.

Follow the screenshot to download the bootable media from Acronis Portal.

Once Downloaded ISO Follow Below Process:

Step2: Start Recovery.

1. Start Recovery.

2. Boot the target machine with Acronis bootable media.

3. Once loaded, select Acronis Cyber Backup > Rescue Media:

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 the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

4. Click Configure Network.

5. Assign a temporary to connect to Network so you can access the Backups.

6. For Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, click Manage this machine locally. For Acronis Cyber Backup, skip this step.

7. Click Recover:

8. Click Select data in What to recover:

9. Click Browse to browse for the backup location.

10. After selecting the backup location, go to the Archive view tab, and select the backup archive that you want to restore. In the Backup contents, section selects the partitions or disks that you want to recover. When you are ready, click OK.

11. Check that the settings are correct.

12. Click OK, Machine Start Restoring you will see the progress bar while the restoration process. Once succeeded without any warning reboot the server, eject Acronis media, and boot the server in the drive.

Restoration is done.

13. If you have Windows Dedicated Server, you require device drivers for the current hardware you are using.

Follow the steps after step 11.

Universal Restore for Windows should be set to Use.

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 an external drive, click the 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.

14. Review the details and click OK to start the operation.

15. Follow step 12.

Click OK, Machine Start Restoring you will see the progress bar while the restoration process. Once succeeded without any warning reboot the server, eject Acronis media and boot the server in the drive.

Restoration is done.