Acronis Universal Restore Iso
Ashlie Hagenson
We have been only using NT Backup to this point, but we are ready to purchase Arcronis SBS Edition. We wanted a quick way to restore without having to first reload the operating system as with NT Backup.
After reading some posts, restoring the image to the original server is very reliable and should work 100% of the time. However, the universal restore feature seems to be a hit or miss on dissimiliar hardware. If the universal restore feature does not work, what options are available?
Is there another alternative to using a VMware session? Since this is a small office not many volunteers understand how the VMWare sessions work. Is there a simplier method or better software to restore to different hardware?
You maybe saying this also, but just want to make sure. Do you think it is faster to run Acronis and reapair the installation versus do an OS install and apply the NT Backup. Above I think you were referring to a fresh install and manually resetting up the whole domain and copying data files over.
Firstly I would just do a bare metal backup if you are pressed for time. Also if your using Acronis why not get the universal deploy upgrade? It allows for mutliple hardware types on the recovery boot cd, which is your problem i.e. not having that applicatoin.
2) Is there another alternative to using a VMware session? Since this is a small office not many volunteers understand how the VMWare sessions work. Is there a simplier method or better software to restore to different hardware?
Thank you for your very detailed answer. I am still coming up to speed on VMware and how it works. I need to try this out. I did not realize that you could run an SBS 2003 server in a VMware session on a regular PC. Pretty neat.
The best solution you mentioned in other posts is running a VMware session as the active server all the time. This maybe a little bit advanced for me, but I would like to get to this point someday. Lets say I did buy a new server and I made an image of our existing server and put it in a VMware session on the new server. I am still a little confused on how I would just backup the VMware session.
In the other post about your NTbackup, remember my recommendation that you separate your data from the Operating System, on another partition? With that done, the daily backups you do will be of that data partition, since that will be what changes day to day.
Thanks for the additional info. I am broadening my understanding of VMware and virtual sessions. I probably will not be venturing into the virtual world for awhile, but something definitely to research and learn more about.
As an online backup service provider we work with a dual combination of Acronis and remote backup all the time. As your system is in a church, my experience has been that almost all church systems are for some reason Dell hardware. The likelihood of encountering a problem restoring an Acronis image from say a Dell SC440 running SBS and moving to the current T100 server are nil with or without the Universal Restore option the motherboards across all of Dell are pretty similar. The usual worst case scenario is needing to run a repair install of SBS in order to recognize the SATA DVD on newer hardware versus the older ones using IDE/ATA.
SBS provides all the network services typically spread out over 2-4 machines on a single machine. It is I/O, memory and processor intensive and not well suited to virtualization on a church budget. The additional overhead of converting all the disk I/O from a virtual hard drive is just about enough to slow it to a crawl.
Restoring to different hardware is not a good time to make RAID changes other than maybe disk sizes. Certanly not making the jump from software RAID 1 on Dell to hardware RAID 5 on 3ware or some such.
Acronis has what they call "Universal Restore" that will let you add storage drivers in to an existing Windows installation. You basically boot a flash drive, select the driver and it inserts the driver. The problem? As with most Acronis stuff it doesn't work. Does anyone know of another software package that has this capibility?
I don't think that many have Universal Restore like Acronis has it. It is virtually a standalone product. Most of the others I have seen have it as part of a restore process. I don't think it is another issue. The stock Universal Restore doesn't recognize any drives because it is set to RST in the BIOS. You have to download the correct drivers and build the Universal Restore media with those drivers before it will recognize the hard drive in the computer so I am sure they are the correct drivers. It simply won't inject those drivers in to the current OS on the computer. Their older versions (11) use to work fine but the most recent (15) doesn't and their support is non-existent. So is Paragon's a "standalone" tool?
But it would make most sense to add the drivers during the restore. Most people don't know in advance which PC model they will be restoring the image to, so they also wouldn't know what drivers to inject into the image.
What you do after restoring on ANOTHER server, is use it from the functions menu, called Adjust OS. It does the same, check Windows, if some drivers are not correct anymore, either install it from the standard repository, or install from the location you point it to where you have the new drivers..
Maybe it is my test setup. It is a Dell Optiplex 3000. In the BIOS I change the controller from RST to AHCI then do a fresh install of Windows 11 Pro and get it running. I then go back into the BIOS and change the controller back to RST. Obviously at this point it blue screens. So this is my test subject. What I am trying to do now is inject the correct RST drivers which would make the computer bootable again.
I hit Dell's web page and download the RST drivers. I am pretty sure they are the correct ones because 1) Windows 11 won't install (in RST mode) until I F6 these drivers and 2) Neither the Acronis or Paragon rescue CDs will recognize the hard drive unless I build the rescue CD with these drivers.
At that point I have no luck injecting those RST drivers in to the OS. Paragon at least gives a little more detail. It tells me what drivers are missing. The RST drivers. But when I point it to the drivers and do a "automatically find" it does not find them or tells me "The Driver is not supported by the program".
Why are you even considering using RST? That is a useless Fake-RAID controller, the performance is bad & it is unreliable. If you want to use RAID, either get a real hardware RAID controller, or use your OS's built-in Software RAID, which performs better (often also better than hardware controllers do)!
If you really want to use the RST RAID, have you setup the array from within the Controller's BIOS before trying the installation? If the array hasn't been setup, it wouldn't be accessible even if you install the correct drivers.
This is what a lot of people don't realize. The big boys are shipping their business computers pre-set using RST. Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. You don't have to have a RAID setup. They ship them RST with a single drive. I agree with your assessment of RST and have forever. The first thing I do when I get a new one in is switch it to AHCI then load it from scratch.
It causes a lot of problems with backups. You install a program to make occasional image backups, the hard drive crashes and you are more or less screwed because the rescue media doesn't know what RST is. It has been an age old problem. No easy way to switch from AHCI to RST.
Sadly, you can't properly test your own test procedure properly, because you don't have the correct software. For fixing a Win11 install, you need the PAID version of either Acronis or Paragon, and it HAS TO BE the NEWEST version too.
I have the latest, PAID, licensed Acronis. Wish I had the money to try one of everything to see it it works but that would be kind of expensive. If Paragon doesn't work simply because it is a trial version then it is out of the running :)
If you have the newest Acronis paid version WITH Universal Restore, you need to make ONE new rescue media, MADE on a working Win11 system. With that media, you can use universal restore with the drivers you downloaded from the Dell site.
That takes us full circle. That is where I started. The downloaded rescue media does not contain the RST drivers so when you boot it there is no hard drive. I downloaded the F6 drivers from Dell and created the rescue media with Universal Restore on a Win 11 computer. It would not, however, insert those F6 drivers in to the OS. See original question.
I wasn't doing a restore. Both Acronis and Paragon offer the Universal Restore as a separate, standalone option after booting the rescue media. I have come to fine out that Paragon has no support and I thought Acronis was bad.....
Don't blame Acronis or Paragon so fast. Please note all manufacturers, be it Dell/HP or even ASUS, do not always provide the CORRECT F6/standard Windows drivers to load. Sometimes I have to try MORE than a handful of drivers (both from manufacturers, as well as the many versions from download.intel.com)
The blame didn't come fast. Acronis has never had support and Paragon is not much longer for this world. If you read the current posts about Paragon their support is non-existent and to add insult to injury their current software doesn't work. So any suggestions besides Acronis and Paragon?
You will need the controller drivers for the PE2600; the executable runs and extracts the drivers to your PC but doesn't install them. You will need the hard drive install version, not the windows installation version. Copy these to a floppy disk..
You will need Acronis Universal Restore feature for this purpose. In the following KB article you can find detailed description of the technology and also some links to step-by-step instructions on how to use Acronis Universal Restore in different Acronis products: kb.acronis.com/.../2149
To get a full driver load you could also temporarily install Win2003 on the system, add all of the drivers and then use something like DoubleDriver portable to save the Win2003 drivers for injection into the Acronis'd image during HIR.
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