Acronis Universal Restore will need drivers from W7 DVD.  

Hello I have a disk image on an external USB drive made with Acronis 2014 and a recovery DVD made by the same program. According to Acronis the Universal Restore function on this boot/recovery DVD will ask for drivers if needed during install and thus enable me to restore the image to a computer with different hardware. It will not restore full functionality but enough that it boots so I can install remaining drivers from within W7.

Now the target computer is old, it's a Core 2 Duo 6400 with a Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 motherboard.

Gigabyte has these drivers on their support page under W7 64-bit:

GIGABYTE SATA2 Preinstall driver (For AHCI / RAID Mode) and
GIGABYTE SATA2 RAID Driver. Gigabyte claims that I won't need them and that the drivers on the W7 DVD will be enough (I am not so sure).

In the event that Gigabyte is correct, how do I get the drivers from the W7 DVD? I assume that I must somehow extract them and burn them to a DVD or put them on the external drive along with my image so I can point to them if Acronis asks.

In the event that I do need the Gigabyte drivers, how do I do? They are in .exe format. I extracted with 7zip but I got a bunch of directories x86, W7 etc and also another .exe plus a bunch of files. The only .inf is in one of the libraries called Drivers along with a .sys and a .cat but the .cat is only 40 kb. The Directory above contains a .cab file.

Also what does preinstall driver mean?

fireberd said:

I don't know if this will address the issue or not. The drivers during install would be for the hard drives and possibly the DVD drive. I never had problems with that. However, I used to have Acronis (up to and including the 2013 version) and had to create the Acronis WinPE recovery disc rather than the "standard" Acronis Recovery disc that uses Linux. With the WinPE (which is what Windows uses when it does an install) you shouldn't have any driver issues for the hard drives or DVD drives.

The other drivers are installed Windows first initializes on a regular install. The MAY automatically install when you first boot into Windows with the different PC.

Up to 2013 you had to buy the Plus Pack in order to use Acronis Universal Restore. As of Acronis True Image 2014 Premium that function is integrated.

Acronis gives you the following choices when creating a Recovery/Boot DVD:

1) Standard Recovery DVD (for machine with the same hardware)

2) Universal Restore Recovery DVD (for machine with same or disimilar hardware, requires Windows AIK to be installed when creating the DVD)

3) Win PE

4) Bart PE


I picked option 2 after installing Windows AIK. The creation of the DVD was fully automated.

I managed to recover a W7 image to a machine with different hardware. It asked for a PCI driver but I skipped it. Upon entering the login screen things went wrong. I logged in and the harddrive worked and worked displaying the wait circle/icon, after 20 min I got back to the login screen with the options to switch user, logout etc. I logged in and the same thing happened. The next time I got back I shut down and rebooted in failsafe mode which worked.

I am not sure what a Win PE DVD is or rather how it is created. The only thing I know is that it is a boot DVD where you can preinstall drivers and that IT professionals use it for deploying a lot of images at the same time, in schools companies etc. Is there a guide somewhere on this?