Using Universal Restore process without first restoring an image

I am using Mustang's Echo Workstation Universal Restore BartPE plugin to restore an image to a system with a different RAID controller.

My image is approximately 300Gb in size and takes several hours to restore -- most likely due to the slow drive containing the image.

The image restores fine, but I keep having trouble with the Universal Restore component. It's been having difficulty finding the correct drivers. It's all been my own fault as the BartPE CD is an XP CD and the machine I'm restoring is a Vista machine.

Is there a way I can skip the restoration process and simply attempt the Universal Restore process? This is dragging out far too long because I have to sit through a redundant three hour process before each new attempt is made.

 

No way to skip the restore process and just use UR. A driver can be manually injected into Windows, but that take a lot of knowledge. If you tell UR where the driver is for the RAID controller, it will not have any trouble finding it.

 

Actually, the problem I'm having is that it is not finding:

pciide.sys
halmacpi.dll
hal.dll
atapi.sys

The error message I am receiving is:

File 'halmacpi.dll', that is required for installation of device 'ACPI Multiprocessor PC (ID: (Standard computers))' in Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate, is not found.

Please consult the vendor of driver installation package.: Ignore/ignore All/Cancel

For pciide.sys the device in the error message is 'Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller (ID: (Standard IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers))'

Note also that before it gets to this process it does not seem to install the RAID driver I specified (the IaStorV driver for my ICH9R RAID controller) as when I reboot the machine it gives BSOD code 7B.

There are some messages pertaining to the IaStorV driver, but I haven't been able to get anything useful out of the error messages. I have attached the log file produced by the process.

Note that the additional folders in which it is searching for drivers are folders I manually specified. d:\drivers is a folder I created and specifically copied the files it says it is missing to. J: is a read-only mounted form of a previous full backup of the original Vista machine.

At this point I am out of ideas for getting my old system working.

Any thoughts?

 

If this were an XP machine and you didn't have UR, I'd suggest doing "an upgrade in place". That is install the operating system over the existing one as an upgrade even though it's the same version. That leaves all the installed applications, settings and data in place but runs the installation to find the necessary drivers on the Windows disk and at the start allows you to press F6 to install RAID or other storage drivers.

Although I've never tried this with Vista, a Vista installation only takes 30-45 min., so it may be worth a try. Of course, you have to have a real Vista installation DVD and not just an OEM image disk.

As a rule of thumb, restoring images runs at around 1GB/min give or take. If your restore runs in less than 300 minutes, 5 hours, you are in the ball park.

 

I have tried this with Vista, and it not only replaces the Windows directory, but also the Program Files and Users directories. It is essentially a brand new install. Sure my documents are there, but none of my settings, which is just as valuable to me.

 

I solved the problem myself. I used the Vista DVD's repair mode to run regedit, load the hive c:\windows\system32\config\system and set the iastor service's start value to 0 (so it's loaded first thing).

 

Interesting solution. Thank you for posting it.

 

Vote here for the standalone option

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=205143

 

Hello wbierman,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Remote Workstation Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for delayed response.

Please be aware that you only need to specify HAL and mass storage controller drivers for Acronis Universal Restore. If you have a particular driver to install, you can specify it manually, instead of automatically searching for it. Please see chapter 3.7 "Acronis Universal Restore" of Acronis True Image Echo Workstation User's Guide for details on using Acronis Universal Restore.

Actually, an option to apply Acronis Universal Restore to an existing system directly is being considered by our Development Team. It's possible that it will be implemented in future versions of Acronis True Image. Unfortunately, the possible time-frame isn't defined.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Implementing that option should be no more then 2 hours of programming ;-)