Back up and restore to new hardware

[petrox]

I had to change Motherboard and CPU also Ram. I kept old Hard drives 3 internal one external. The Computer store told me that I can not recover my programs from the back ups to be used on the new Computer as all the Hardware is different. I will need to reinstall all of it. I did not know that this restriction exists. I am using Acronis 2016. This is a total pain. Is there a way to get my programs back without needing to re install them? If the hardware had remained the same all would be well.Regards Peter

 

[samuria]

It's suck it and see you can try and boot the drive from old system if there are major changes it may not work but you could then try a repair. If it's not a lot different it may just work but need some drivers

 

[RolandJS]

Cloning or full-image restoring onto a target HD can work, if one can supply the drivers necessary for the target computer's Windows and drivers for some of the 3rd party programs.

 

[petrox]

Hi RolandJS, here is what happened. The Computer store installed a new motherboard, CPU I-5-6400 Skylake, A new Case and 8 GB of DDR 4 Ram. Inside were the three old Hard drives and the E sata card for the external drive which had all the backups for the three internal drives. The computer did not have all the Icons on the desktop as before but only the Recycle bin and IE when I got it back. The OS was Win7 HP 64 bit, my old system. So I thought to get all my programs back I just had to Restore the C: drive from my back up. I did that and--- the Computer would not boot period. The computer store tech now told me that I can not do that because the hardware is all different. So they redid the install of my Win7 and again all I had was as before Recycle bin and IE. All my programs had to be reinstalled. I did not know that a new Motherboard and CPU would prevent the restore function from working. Also I could not find in the Acronis 2016 the files even though I clicked folders and files the backed up entry for my programs like Malware bytes, Adobe Photoshop etc, this was a big surprise for me. The above is just for your information and not for you to help fix. The Back up software people do not tell you that this restriction is present as I understand it. Important to note that the old box was Legacy BIOS and the new one is UEFI along with hardrive system of AHCI maybe that is the problem. Regards Peter