Do I have to even reformat the drive before restoring my computer?

Unfortunately my main drive of my laptop failed. I have backed up my drive using incremental image. Do I have to format the new drive or Acronis True Image will take care of that? Also, if I need to format do I have to even install the original Windows XP disk into the new drive before attempting to restore with Acronis 9.

 

No, when you restore the image to the new drive the format goes with it. The format is really just the file system structure.

You do not install True Image on the new disk. Just boot from your Recovery CD that you should have made when you installed True Image.

 

Providing you backed up the whole of your old drive all you have to do is restore to the new one. You will then be back to where you were when the last incremental backup was made. No prior preparation of the new drive is needed.

Xpilot.

 

Hello harddriveuser,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please note that if you are to restore to a new hard drive you can boot from Acronis True Image 9.0 Home Bootable Rescue Media (a CD-R(W) disc, a set of floppy diskettes, a USB flash card or a ZIP-diskette) and perform the restore process. You do not need to format the new hard drive prior to restore. All the data stored on the restored partition will be replaced by the image data. And, as Xpilot said, after you restore the image you will get your system back to the moment of the last incremental backup creation. Additional information can be found in Chapter 6. "Restoring the backup data" in the Acronis True Image 9.0 Home User Guide.

Thank you.
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Aleksandr Isakov