ASUS Eee PC: Windows 7, Acronis True Image Universal Restore, and Partitions

I put my laptop up for sale and got an ASUS Eee PC 1215T-MU17-SL.  Got it on sale for $359, reasoning that if inflation kicked in and/or the Japanese earthquake/tsunami damage affected equipment production, prices may not continue to drop as rapidly as they have in recent years.  Operationally speaking, the theory, not yet tested, was that I would be able to go running with this in my Deuter Speed Lite 20 backpack, and then just sit down and go to work, out in the woods or wherever.

First, I had to configure the Eee the way I wanted it.  Its hard drive, at around 300GB formatted, was big enough for a lot of material, but they had devoted 100GB to the Win7 Home Premium partition.  Then there was another 15GB partition, apparently containing a backup of the original Win7 installation, as well as a tiny program partition at the end.  It seemed advisable to squeeze out some disk space, if possible.

My plan for disk space was to start with a backup of the existing program partition, copied to an external USB drive in case everything went south.  I used Acronis True Image for this purpose.  I was able to get Acronis loaded onto a USB flash drive, which was necessary since (a) the Eee didn't have a CD/DVD drive and (b) I didn't have an external USB CD/DVD drive to connect to it.  I wasn't taking notes at the time, but in my recollection the process I used to get Acronis onto the thumb drive was, first, to install Acronis on a desktop and then use that program's Bootable Rescue Media Builder to install the program onto the USB drive.  If I hadn't already bought Acronis, I probably would have started with a highly rated freeware imaging program.  CNET listed several -- Easeus Todo, Macrium Reflect, and Paragon Backup & Recovery Advanced -- that would have been worth trying.  Getting them onto a USB drive might have entailed the use of Unetbootin or Universal USB Installer.  In all events, booting from a USB flash drive was a hassle:  the BIOS on the Eee would not reliably remember its previous settings, so that it was necessary to reset the BIOS to boot from the jump drive each time.  The essential first step, there, was to hold down F2 as soon as the machine started to boot.

I really wanted to move if not delete that 15GB original backup partition.  I'd be glad to keep an image of a virgin installation offline, on a hard drive on the desktop, where space was cheap; but in the field, if I was limited to one backup image, I'd prefer that it would be an image of the program drive in its current configuration.  In other words, if I had to restore Windows 7, I would ordinarily try first to restore from a drive image that included a fairly recent collection of the various programs and settings that I would be using from day to day.  And I wouldn't store this image in the middle of the hard drive; I'd put it on a partition at the end, where it would be out of the way.

I gathered, from various comments, that if you moved that backup partition, the machine would no longer be able to restore it quickly using the built-in backup setup.  I wasn't too concerned about that, but it was a thought to take into account.  I was also concerned that messing with the partitions would somehow invalidate the warranty.  I didn't explore that question extensively, but as far as I could tell at a brief glance, that was not the case.  So it seemed that I could go ahead and adjust the partitions to taste.

My first step, after making an image of the original installation, was to delete the drive C partition.  I did this with a copy of GParted, installed on a UHSB drive using Universal USB Installer (above).  That step gave me 100GB of unallocated space at the start of the drive.  Now, ideally, I would use the Universal Restore feature of Acronis Drive Image Plus Pack (my reason for buying an Acronis update) to restore a previous Windows 7 installation to what they called "dissimilar hardware."  That is, I wondered whether I could save myself a lot of program installation and tweaking time by restoring a copy of my desktop computer's Windows 7 installation to the Eee.  Apparently I'd have to either uninstall Win7 from the desktop or buy a second license if I wanted to use Win7 on both.  Either way, it seemed like it would be a lot easier to use the Acronis approach than to manually recreate all of the steps I had gone through to tweak my Win7 system the way I liked.  In my previous experiments with the Universal Restore capability, it had seemed that it would be crucial to obtain the drivers for the Eee's hard drive controller or chipset.  The Acronis procedure asked me whether I wanted to include such drivers but, alas, I was not able to detect exactly where the desired drivers were located.  I tried running the restore without them, but got this message:

Device driver 'PCI \VEN_1002&DEV_4391&SUBSYS_11171043&REV_00' for 'Windows 7' cannot be found.
The driver for the device cannot be found in the operating system or in the additionally specified drivers.

I tried searching my desktop computer and online for various forms of that specified driver, but no luck.   I clicked "Ignore" and got no further error messages, but also got a system that would not start.  It would get to the point of giving me a choice of booting into Safe Mode or Normal Mode, but neither went anywhere.  One problem was that I was working with current Eee drivers in the downloaded .exe format, whereas I was supposed to extract the .inf, .sys, or .oem drivers from those exes.  There seemed to be drivers for both the SATA and the chipset, with no explanation as to which I needed.  I decided to extract them both, put them into one folder on another USB drive, and let Acronis choose which one it needed.  But I really had no idea what to extract.  The SATA download, for instance, contained no files in any of those three formats.  It did contain two .cab files, but neither WinRAR nor 7zip was able to extract anything from them.  The Acronis forums seemed to contain a number of messages from frustrated users, but I thought I should probably post a question myself.  But I hated to burden the system with a question that had already been asked and answered, so I searched again.  One thread advised that I should extract from the .exe, not from the .cab, so I tried that; but that, too, gave me the "not a supported archive" error in 7zip.  That was when I used the right-click 7zip option in Windows Explorer.  When I went at it from inside 7zip, the recommended "Open Inside" command did nothing.  Another post clarified that the single thing I most clearly needed was the driver for the hard drive controller -- but even then, it still sounded like I also needed chipset drivers.  HackerJoe in that same thread suggested that perhaps I should have installed the latest hard drive controller while I still had the system running, and then keep a copy of the C:\Windows\Inf folder and point Acronis to that.  Well, but at least I had an old copy of that folder, in the drive image that I had already made.  I hooked the backup drive to another computer, opened that image, and copied its C:\Windows\Inf folder to a new folder, INF, on the external drive.  I reconnected the external drive to the Eee, re-ran Acronis, pointed to that inf folder, and told it to restore both drive C and the MBR.  This time, it ended with a different error message:

File 'amdsata.sys', that is required for installation of device 'AMD SATA Controller (ID: AMD)' in Windows 7, cannot be found.

It seemed to me that this message should have come up during the first try, when I clicked "Ignore" instead of "Ignore All."  Anyway, a quick search on the desktop computer suggested that amdsata.sys came in different versions, but that for the last two years its size had not changed.  I added a copy of that file to the INF folder on the external USB drive and clicked Ignore.  Now I got another error:

File 'AtiPcie.sys', that is required for installation of device 'AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver (ID: Advanced Micro Devices Inc)' in Windows 7, cannot be found.

I was grateful that, this time, I did get more than one error message, so as to remedy multiple problems before trying again.  On the other hand, I was concerned that a message relating to PCIE did not really seem to be relevant to the the hard disk controller -- that, in other words, the advice from Acronis to focus on the hard drive controller did not seem to cover the entire situation.  On the desktop machine, atipcie.sys was in C:\Windows\System32\drivers.  That was also where amdsata.sys (above) had been.  It seemed that I might be able to anticipate most if not all Universal Restore errors by adding the contents of that Drivers folder to the INF folder on the external drive.  I did that.  The INF folder now had 1,912 items, but they took only 146MB of disk space -- less, if I had deleted the subfolders contained within it, where I doubted the Acronis process would search.  Then it occurred to me that these desktop versions of these files -- of amdsata.sys, AtiPcie.sys, and so forth -- might not be what was needed on the Eee.  It seemed, in other words, that I should have copied C:\Windows\System32 from within the previous Acronis backup, not from the desktop.  So I went back, wiped out the INF folder, and did it over again, this time copying everything from the C:\Windows\Inf and C:\Windows\System32\drivers folders contained within the Acronis backup of the original Eee PC's drive C installation.

With that done, I clicked Ignore again. This time, it said, "Recover operation failed."  Before attempting another recover process, I tried booting the Eee in Safe Mode.  It got as far as listing AtiPcie.sys.  There, it stalled and, after a minute or so, it rebooted.  Seeing AtiPcie.sys at that location suggested that the list of .sys files shown when going into Safe Mode might be the complete list of what was needed in order to make the Acronis Universal Restore process work.  What I should have done, in that case, was to boot the Eee in Safe Mode in the first place (while I still had the original drive C partition), videotape the list of files that it was loading, and make sure those were present in the INF folder on the external drive.  But it seemed the list might change, and anyway it would take time to write it up and verify it, so I hoped this simple step of copying over these files from these folders would do the trick.  I went back into Acronis on the Eee, pointed toward the INF folder on the external drive as the source of drivers, and went through the steps of recovering the full Windows 7 installation from the desktop machine.  This time, I got "Recover operation succeeded" without any error messages.  So it appeared that the approach of pointing Acronis to a whole folder full of .inf and .sys files was on the right track.  I rebooted the Eee and got a "Starting Windows" screen.  Success!

Now there was a problem of making sure Windows 7 from the desktop was actually going to run.  It was trying to load all the things that the desktop version would load, and some of those were not relevant.  I restarted in Safe Mode by hitting F8 repeatedly as soon as it rebooted.  There, I went into Control Panel (using Small Icons, not Category view) and went into two different areas.  First, in Programs and Features, I uninstalled programs that I would not be using on the notebook (e.g., video editing).  Second, in Device Manager, I looked for inappropriate hardware.  The only item marked as dysfunctional was the ethernet device, probably because I had chosen Safe Mode without networking.  I rebooted into Normal Mode.  No, there was an Ethernet Controller problem here too.  I right-clicked and chose Uninstall.  Also, since there did not seem to be a need for the 15GB partition mentioned above, I went into GParted and deleted it, and also rearranged and added partitions as desired.  The desktop installation used one of these new partitions as drive X (called BACKROOM) to hold the paging file, caches, temporary internet files, and other items that did not need to be on drive C, where they would bloat any backup drive images I might make, so now I imitated that layout on the Eee.

Unfortunately, at this point I began running into problems.  It seems that my first step should have been to delete my user profile and create a new one, or perhaps to include some kind of generic or blank user profile before making the drive image that I was now restoring.  Win7 was trying to load all kinds of stuff that wasn't going to work, and many of its settings were wrong.  In both Normal and Safe modes, I wound up getting stymied by "Server execution failed" errors.  A search led to suggestions that the problem was due to the registry looking for partitions that did not yet exist -- that I had not yet had time to create or re-letter using diskmgmt.msc in the new installation.  That may have been related, also, to my attempt to set up a paging file on one of those other partitions before re-lettering it.  Specifically, the desktop machine had the drive X (BACKROOM) partition just mentioned, as well as an INSTALL partition as drive W, containing my customized Start Menu.

So I started again.  Second time around, restoring again from the Acronis backup of the desktop, I was back to getting the first error reported above:  "Device driver 'PCI \VEN_1002&DEV_4391&SUBSYS_11171043&REV_00' for 'Windows 7' cannot be found."  I wondered if this was because I had allowed the contents of the C:\Windows\inf folder, copied to the external USB drive, to be overwritten by the contents of the System32\drivers folder.  So now I connected the USB drive back to the desktop computer and copied just the inf folder to it.  That is, I did not again copy the drivers folder.  But this was not the solution:  I got the PCI device driver error again.  Puzzling!  After I clicked "Ignore" on that error, it again reported that the recovery operation had succeeded.  I tried to boot the machine into Safe Mode.  It stalled momentarily at the line referring to CLASSPNP.SYS and then restarted itself back to the boot menu.  Second time, I let it try to go into Normal Mode, but that failed too.  Same thing when I selected the Last Known Good Configuration option from the boot menu.  I verified that the INF folder did have a copy of Classpnp.sys.  It hadn't been bad previously.  A search led to the suggestions that this could involve a problem with hardware or a corrupted master boot record on the hard drive.  Someone at Microsoft suggested that Classpnp.sys problems could stem from many sources, including a corrupt registry or a missing or damaged system file or device driver.  It occurred to me that, of course, I had been rewriting the external USB drive with the contents of the inf and drivers folders on the desktop PC, not from the backup of the Eee.  In other words, I had deleted the INF folder, thinking I wouldn't be needing it anymore, and now that I did need it, I had been recreating it the wrong way.  Dumb mistake.  I started over, making sure this time to populate the INF folder on the external drive with drivers and system files from the Acronis backup of the original Eee installation.  I copied both of those folders to the INF folder at the same time, paying no attention as to which would overwrite which.  I tried again with Acronis.  This time, I did something a little different from before.  I had not previously noticed the Options option in Acronis, but now I selected "Validate backup archive before recovery" and "Reboot the computer automatically if needed for the recovery."  But as I saw after five or ten minutes, the validation step was going to take an estimated hour or more, so I clicked Cancel and tried again without that option.  I had already validated the backup when I had made it, so that step did not seem vital.

This time, the recovery process was successful.  Now I had to see about a more cautious way of proceeding.  It seemed that the first task was to create those drives W and X, before something in the registry could try to refer to them and get itself confused.  I wondered if the DISKPART command-line tool would provide a solution.  A search led to a Microsoft webpage telling me basically to go to Start > Run > cmd, here on the desktop machine, and type "diskpart" and then "commands."  The information provided there wasn't very helpful, so I tried a search and concluded that the sequence was, first, to type "diskpart" to get to the DISKPART prompt, and then use LIST and SELECT commands to find the right partition, and then use ASSIGN commands to assign the drive letters.  So the sequence I actually used, after booting up my new Win7 reinstallation (and now it did boot), was to start by ignoring error messages produced by Win7's attempt to identify all the ways in which this Eee PC is so different from the desktop machine where the Acronis drive image came from.  Instead, when the hard drive mostly stops searching, go directly to Start > Run > cmd > DISKPART.  Doing this, while there was still an hourglass prompt, gave me a message, "Windows Explorer is not responding."  I opted to close the program.  The keyboard would not let me type "cmd" -- it was giving me "c0d" instead -- but fortunately there was a drop-down cmd option.  Apparently the installation remembered that I had run cmd on the desktop machine.  So I arrowed down and hit Enter on that.  But this was no solution:  it was not letting me type "diskpart" at the command prompt either.  So now there seemed to be a choice between rebooting or trying to run diskmgmt.msc.

Rebooting seemed like sure death, so I tried Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc.  Here, again, the keyboard was noncompliant; the drop-down option saved me.  It hadn't worked to reletter INSTALL as W first, so this time I began with relettering BACKROOM as X.  That worked.  I was tempted to reboot now, but I thought maybe I should try to clean up as much as I could before taking the risk that the system might never wake up once I let it go to sleep.  The first step, I thought, would be to create a new Administrator profile.  I went into Start > Control Panel but, alas, "Server execution failed."  The keyboard was still noncompliant.  Stuck!  Rebooted into Safe Mode.  Attempts to get into Control Panel from the Start Menu produced "Server execution failed" error messages here too.  I tried to start Control Panel > User Accounts in a cmd box by typing nusrmgr.cpl.  The keyboard was still screwed up, so I tried typing it using ASCII codes:  hold down the Alt key, type the three-letter code, and then let go of the Alt key and repeat for each letter.  So, for instance, from the list of ASCII codes, I saw that the code for the letter U (the first one that was giving me trouble) was 117, so I hit Alt-117.  The Eee PC didn't have a separate numeric keypad (essential for this purpose), so I actually had to hold down Alt-FN and then use the double-purpose keys, which in this case happened to be jj7.  So it was Alt-FN-jj7 to get a "u" on the command line.  This ultimately gave me nusrmgr.cpl, but that wasn't the answer:  I got "nusrmgr.cpl is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."  Another webpage made me think that what I should have been typing was "control.exe nusrmgr.cpl."  I tried that, using the Up arrow and the Home key to recycle the previous command instead of having to retype it.  The command worked, in the sense of giving me another "Server execution failed" error.

Drawing on another source, I tried typing lusrmgr.msc at the prompt and, woo hoo!  that actually opened something.  Under "Local Users and Groups (Local)" I clicked on Users.  Then, from the menu, I selected Action > New User.  I created a new user, Admin2, and then closed out of that.  I right-clicked on Admin2 and went into Properties > Member of (because it only showed "Users") > Add > Advanced.  It defaulted to "Groups" as the object type, so I clicked on "Find Now" and selected Administrators > OK > OK.  Now I seemed to be seeing Administrators as a group that Admin2 was a member of.  In the General tab, I indicated "Password never expires" > Apply.  I restarted the computer in Safe Mode.  It went right in without asking for a password, so I figured I must have previously set Administrator to be the default login.  I went into Start > Shut Down (the little button next to it) > Switch User.  I logged in as Admin2.  No errors!  Control Panel available!  I went into Control Panel > User Accounts > Change your account type.  It wouldn't let me change Admin2 to be an administrator.  I went to Start > Run > controluserpasswords2.  There wasn't actually a Run option, and that command yielded nothing in the search box.  I switched back to Administrator account and tried controluserpasswords2 there.  Ultimately, I wound up back in the Local Users and Groups dialog.  This time, I decided to make Admin2 have the same groups as Administrator, so I used the same procedures to designate Admin2 a member of Administrators, Debugger Users, and HomeUsers, but not of just plain Users.  Then I tried deleting Administrator.  It wouldn't let me delete a built-in account.  I switched into Admin2 and remembered that I could use Start > cmd even if I couldn't use Start > Run.  So in cmd I typed "controluserpasswords2."  But that didn't work either.  David Candy said the command-line equivalent of controluserpasswords2 was "rundll32.exe netplwiz.dll,UsersRunDll." He was right.  There, in the Users tab, I clicked "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer." That ungreyed the "Properties" option for Admin2, where the Group Membership tab gave me an option to name Admin2 as an Administrator.  Apparently the previous attempt to do that hadn't worked, but now I selected that and went Apply > OK and then unchecked that same "Users must enter a user name and password" option.  Then Apply > OK > logoff.  Now it asked me who I wanted to log in as.  So I wouldn't be automatically out of luck if the Administrator account went south.  I rebooted into Normal Mode and logged in as Admin2.  Still good, but now it was logging that user in automatically.  Turns out I was using the wrong command:  I should have been typing "control userpasswords2" as two words, not one.  OK, so it worked now.  I didn't really want to have to construct a whole new Admin2 account, so I thought I'd try again to fix the Administrator account, now that I was confident that the machine would probably work for me in some sense even if that particular account was fubar.  I logged in as Administrator.  But attempts to do anything still gave me "Server execution failed."

It occurred to me that possibly I could help the situation by going into Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and killing programs that might be causing related difficulties.  I basically closed every program that was shown with the Administrator (as distinct from SYSTEM or Admin2) user, except for taskmgr.exe itself.  Then I restarted a session of explorer.exe (using File > New Task right there in Task Manager) and tried again to get into Control Panel.  I still got "Server execution failed."   I could have proceeded on to close system programs in Task Manager, but the situation seemed futile.

In short, I had made some progress and had learned some things, but in the end I had not achieved a superior result over the default installation on the ASUS Eee PC.  It would have been, and was going to be, faster and more reliable to start with the pre-installed Windows 7 on the Eee and build a new user profile -- a copy of the built-in Administrator account, it seemed -- than to attempt to bring one over from the existing desktop computer's Windows 7 installation.  I restored the original Win7 installation to the Eee, arranged my partitions to suit, and began painfully working through the tweaks that I had developed on the desktop computer.  This process, on the Eee, is described in another post.

Acronis True Image Home 2011: Restoring Windows 7 to RAID 0: FAIL

I had installed Windows 7 on a regular hard drive -- what Win7 calls a "basic" drive.  I had made an image using Acronis True Image Home 2011 (ATIH).  Now I was trying to restore that image -- using the ATIH Universal Restore feature installed by the Acronis Plus Pack -- to a new, empty software RAID0 array that I had just created in Windows 7.  This post describes my efforts.

For perspective, I could perhaps restore an image of a Windows 7 installation onto a hardware RAID0 array, and I might be able to restore an Acronis image of a RAID0 array to a non-RAID partition.  Acronis promised that the Plus Pack would enable me to restore to a striped software RAID0 array.  But now that I had made the purchase, a search led to a thread suggesting that the promise was false.

Here's how the effort unfolded.  After booting the ATIH CD, I went into Recover My Disks > Browse (wait) > select the .tib file to restore (or, in my case, the first of the five DVD-sized files comprising the backup).  I went on, OK, Next, and came to "Recover whole disks and partitions" and "Use Acronis Universal Restore."  It gave me the option of adding device drivers.  On the assumption, at that point, that drivers were not necessary in a software array, I clicked Next.  I indicated the partition I wanted to recover, and specified New Location as the dynamic volume that I had created for this purpose.  (Dynamic volumes were listed at the bottom of the screen -- I had to scroll to see them all.)  I clicked Next, and here is the message I got:

You are about to recover a partition containing OS files.  If the recovery destination is an existing non-active dynamic volume, then the system will be unbootable because activation of dynamic volumes is not supported.  Are you sure you want to continue?

I searched and found only a few links containing that statement about activation.  A post by an Acronis employee in an Acronis forum said, "The issue will be resolved in a future update of our software."  To see if the most recent update had resolved it, I went to the Acronis site and downloaded the latest build of ATIH.  I was doing this from an Ubuntu live CD, so I had to save the download (an .exe file) to a USB drive and jump it over to my laptop, running Vista, to install the .exe so I could burn an updated CD that would hopefully have better news for me in terms of restoring to a Win7 RAID0 array.  This was a lot of fooling around.

While that was happening, I went ahead with the next step, using my present copy of ATIH.  Alas, a new error:

There may not be enough free space on the system partition to boot up your operating system after recovery.

This was an odd message.  I had two 50GB partitions in my new RAID0 array.  The backup I had made was from just one partition of either 40GB or 50GB.  I clicked OK there and Acronis stopped.  It didn't try to see whether the restore would fit.  Evidently it was not set up to think in terms of RAID0 arrays.

I guessed that even the updated ATIH would not try to fix this.  But it was going to be a while before I could find out for sure.  The installation on the laptop was taking its sweet time.  After seemingly completing most of the installation, it aborted with this message:

Installation Incomplete

The installation was interrupted before Acronis True Image Home 2011 could be installed.

I didn't know who or what interrupted it.  The laptop was just sitting off to the side, doing its own thing.  I wasn't touching it.  I tried again.  Now I got a new error message:

The error was encountered while the installation.

That's really it.  That was what the message said.  It provided technical details that I didn't understand.  Toward the bottom, it said, "A possible reason might be that you do not have enough privileges."  OK, Vista.  Even though I was running as Administrator on the laptop, that was not enough, and possibly the good people at ATIH couldn't have noticed that until we were at the end of the installation process.  I was unfortunately not knowledgeable enough about the solution and was quite tired and not very patient with the idea of researching that question in order to resolve this tangent from a tangent.

I gave up on that Vista errand and just installed the upgraded ATIH on a Windows XP machine.  No permissions issues.  The upgrade took a while, but then it was successful.  Now I needed to remember how to install the Plus Pack.  My previous post about Plus Pack led me to an Acronis instructions webpage.  The basic process seemed to be to install ATIH, install the Plus Pack, and then go into the new Start Menu entry for Plus Pack and click on Acronis WinPE ISO Builder.  That required me to "Specify a path to the folder with the WinPE files."  A search for that exact statement yielded only a post where someone was trying to combine ATIH and Acronis Disk Director on one CD.  A different search led to an Acronis page instructing me to download the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit (AIK) from Microsoft.  This was a 1.7GB download.  Was this really what people had to do if they wanted to use Acronis Universal Restore?

I went back to the search and tried a different Acronis page.  This page said that Plus Pack had three benefits, and it pointed me to three separate webpages describing those benefits:  it would support dynamic drives and GUID partition tables (GPT); it would facilitate Universal Restore between dissimilar hardware, including virtual machines; and the WinPE part would create bootable rescue media.  The page on dynamic drives led to a page on RAID support, cited above, that led in turn to a table, summarizing the kinds of RAID support provided by various versions of Windows.  It said that ATIH Plus Pack supported restoring to RAID0.

The page regarding Universal Restore said that it would work only if "You have created Acronis Bootable Media (standard, WinPE, or BartPE) after the installation of Acronis True Image Home 2011 Plus Pack."  So apparently there were three different kinds of Acronis bootable media.  To see more about that, I went back into the Start Menu, on the XP machine where I had just installed ATIH, and chose the option to start up ATIH.  In its main screen, I went to "Create bootable media."  So this was going to give me the standard variety.  I burned it to a CD.  Much easier than creating WinPE media.

With that CD, I was ready for the next step.  Acronis said that I would need drivers for the hard drive controller or the chipset, in .inf, .sys, or .oem forms -- extracted, if necessary, from .exe, .cab, or .zip files.  The last time I had played with Acronis Universal Restore, I hadn't understood this driver situation and, as I dimly recalled, part of the problem was that I didn't know which drivers I should get and how I should extract them.  It was clearer to me, now, that there was no getting around it:  I had to have exactly the right drivers.  I have written up that pursuit in a separate post, for those whom it puzzles as it puzzled me.

Not to say that I came to a clear understanding.  I just made a stab at it.

With the drivers collected in a folder, I booted the Universal Restore CD.  When I got to the Drivers Manager step, I clicked Add Search Path and pointed to that folder.  Oddly, when I did, Acronis reported, "No items to display," even though I had just put 16 driver files in there.  I guessed that this meant it had not refreshed its view at that point.  It did not have an option to do so.  I proceeded to designate what I wanted to restore and where I wanted to restore it.  Once again, sadly, I got that error message indicating that "activation of dynamic volumes is not supported," followed by that error indicating that there might not be enough space to boot the operating system after recovery, and once again that was the end.

The working conclusion, at this point, was that ATIH did not support Windows 7 programs partitions in RAID0.  I could install Win7 manually in that kind of partition, and perhaps I could use ATIH to back up a manual installation, but I could not use ATIH to restore any such backup to that location.

I clicked on the Help button in Acronis and browsed its contents, to see if I could get a clearer idea about all this.  They didn't seem to have any information on it.  I posted a question about this on an Acronis forum.  Responses to that question tentatively supported the working conclusion that ATIH does not restore images to Win7 software RAID0 arrays.

Acronis True Image Plus Pack: Converting a Virtual Machine to a Physical Machine

I was using Windows XP as the guest operating system in a virtual machine (VM) on VMware Workstation 7.1, running on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I had developed a customized WinXP installation in that VM.  Now I wanted to install that same tweaked version in physical form, as a dual-boot option on that computer.  I did not want to go through all of the time-consuming steps that had been required to create that tweaked installation.  I hoped, instead, that it would be possible somehow to convert the VM to a physical installation.  This post describes what I tried and learned in that effort.

The fact that both the VM and the physical dual-boot installation would be on the same computer did not necessarily make things easier.  VMware VMs used virtual hardware that did not match my physical hardware.  In other words, simply making an image of the VM and restoring it to the physical machine would run into the same problems as if I made an image on one physical computer and restored it on another.  That's not to say it couldn't be done.  It would just require more than a simple image-and-restore procedure.

There seemed to be a couple of different ways to go.  Through a search, I found that VMware itself offered a virtual-to-physical (V2P) conversion procedure.  This would permit conversion of the .vmdk file directly to a physical installation.  That procedure was quite complex, however, and that meant there could be quite a few ways in which it might not go exactly according to plan.  There was also the problem that, according to the detailed description, they had not actually tested it on Windows XP.  It seemed that it might be worth investing the time in this procedure if I were going to do this frequently.  A quick glance suggested that many of the steps would only be hard or time-consuming the first time around.  For my purposes, though, I was not sure that this would be much faster than just reinstalling Windows from scratch, and it would probably be less reliable.

What looked more promising was to try the Universal Restore feature of Acronis True Image 2011 (ATI).  Universal Restore was available through the Plus Pack that had to be purchased in addition to ATI itself.  The combination of ATI and Plus Pack, together, would cost around $80 unless you got it on sale.  The general concept seemed to be that you would install ATI, install the Plus Pack, create a bootable ATI CD (or USB drive) that would automatically include the Universal Restore capability (provided you did install the Plus Pack first), use that to make an image of the VM, and then restore that image to the physical machine.  So this is what I decided to try.

When I started poking around the Acronis website in search of guidance on the details of the Universal Restore process, I came across a link to a search of the Acronis KnowledgeBase.  This turned up more than a thousand entries.  A quick scan of some of the first search results suggested that some of those entries existed because people had run into problems in the Universal Restore process.  It seemed I would need to brace myself for a somewhat finicky and potentially time-consuming effort.  I decided to go ahead with it, though.  Unlike the VMware V2P process, I knew that I had used Acronis many times in recent years, and I figured I would probably be using this procedure again, or something related to it.  So it would hopefully be a productive time investment.

The Universal Restore process was emphatically a restore process.  The instructions I planned to follow began with the assumption that I already had an Acronis image of the VM that I wanted to convert to a physical installation.  I thought, at first, that making an image of a virtual machine would be a matter of setting up VMware Workstation so that it would boot from the Acronis CD or USB drive (or, conceivably, from an ISO).  I had already worked through that setup process in another post.  So now I just had to insert my Acronis CD, boot the VM, and make the backup image on a Windows-compatible (e.g., NTFS) partition.  The VM booted, saw the CD, and Acronis started.  In my tweaked Windows installation, I had put the paging file on a separate virtual partition, so I didn't include that in the backup.

For the destination of my backup, unfortunately, I had a problem.  Within this virtual world, Acronis didn't see my "network" drives -- that is, the physical drives located within this same computer that VMware treated as though they were on a network.  I bailed out of the backup process and went into Acronis's Tools & Utilities > Add New Disk.  But that didn't provide a solution either.  My searches didn't lead to an answer.  A seemingly off-target post gave me the idea that maybe the solution was to install Acronis inside the VM and then try to do the backup there.  So I did that, and it worked.  I saved the system backup to a separate NTFS formatted drive, so that it would be visible to my Acronis CD.

I rebooted the system with the Acronis CD in the drive, and went into Acronis.  I selected Recover > My Disks > Browse and went to the image I wanted to restore.  I chose the Universal Restore option and, hoping that Acronis had already loaded itself into memory, I took out the Acronis CD and inserted my motherboard's driver installation CD.  Then I told Acronis to Add Search Path for the CD drive.  I told it to restore both drive C and the MBR and Track 0.  I designated the new partition where I wanted this to be restored to.  I named that same disk as the target for the MBR recovery.  I went ahead and the recovery process got underway.  After a while, I got an error message,

Device driver 'PCID\VEN_1002&DEV_4390&SUBSYS_B0021458&REV_00' for 'Microsoft Windows XP Professional' cannot be found.

So, oops, apparently Acronis was looking for the drivers that it did include on its own Universal Restore CD, not for the motherboard drivers.  It seemed that I should have left the Acronis CD in the drive for the time being.  The dialog did not give me a "retry" option, so it looked like this restoration might be toast.  I reinserted the Acronis CD, clicked Cancel, and started over.  But after I re-entered the target location and other options, it froze.  I punched the computer's reset button and re-restarted.  So then it went ahead and did the recovery.  But then it wound up at the same error message.  A search for that device driver name produced only four webpages, none in English, but a search for the vendor suggested that Acronis wanted the ATI driver, which I guessed meant the video driver.  So apparently it had not necessarily been a mistake to leave the motherboard's driver CD in the drive, first time around.

My hunch as to the nature of this problem was that simply pointing the installer to the CD drive was not specific enough; it was not going to search all of the subdirectories on the CD to find what it needed.  I put the motherboard CD back in the drive.  I decided, this time, to click the "Ignore" button on the dialog, so it would move on past this error and show me what came next.  Boom!  It immediately said, "Recover operation succeeded."  I wasn't sure it had needed or even looked at the motherboard CD at all.  I took out the CD, closed Acronis, and the system rebooted.  I turned off the power before it got itself fully back up again and disconnected the hard drive that contained my original dual-boot installation of Windows XP, so that now it would have to boot from the newly restored Windows XP partition or nothing.  And the answer was:  nothing.  I got "Error loading operating system."

I did a search and found that, for Patrink Zink, the solution was just to do a cold reboot.  Another thread emphasized connecting the new drive to the same SATA port as the previous program drive.  Another thread made me wonder whether it would have helped to create the target partition in Acronis rather than using GParted.  Yet another thread said something about drivers.  I figured that was the answer.  Apparently whatever I had done with the Acronis CD was a flop.  Just out of curiosity, I booted from the Windows XP installation CD and went into the Recovery Console.  I got there by pressing F8 a bunch of times before the "Error loading operating system" message could come up.  Normally, that would have put me into WinXP's Safe Mode, but apparently Safe Mode was not interested in helping me out.  In Recovery Console, I poked around enough to verify that something resembling a Windows operating system had indeed been installed on the drive.  I typed "chkdsk /r" and let that run.  Then I typed "fixboot" and then "fixmbr."  Then I tried rebooting from the hard drive.  No joy; still "error loading operating system."

I started over again with the Acronis CD.  Following the Acronis guide page, I looked for hard drive controller drivers or chipset drivers.  There was a GSATA folder in the BootDrv folder of the motherboard driver CD, so I designated that as the place for Acronis to look for what it wanted.  But Acronis said "No items to display" when I went to that folder, making me think that it was not finding the right drivers there.  I went into the Chipset folder on the CD, but same thing there.  After checking about 20 folders and finding that none of them had any items that the CD wished to display, I went back to the BootDrv\GSATA folder and designated that, and then proceeded with the recovery process.  It gave me the same error (above).  When it was done, I rebooted.  This time, instead of giving me an "Error loading operating system" message, the cursor just sat there after the "Boot from CD/DVD" line.

I gave it five or ten minutes and then shut the machine down.  I unplugged the new drive and reconnected the old one.  But then -- what's this?  It froze after "Boot from CD/DVD" even though the new drive wasn't connected!  I shut the machine down again, and this time I also disconnected the other hard drive, where I had stored the Acronis backup.  So now only the old Windows program drive was connected.  That worked:  I now got the GRUB2 menu, and the choice of going into Ubuntu or WinXP.  I tried starting the machine again, this time with only the new Windows program drive connected, using the same SATA cable as I had just used with the old drive.  But it was no use:  I got "Error loading operating system" again.

It occurred to me that this was a basic bootup problem, and for that purpose I could try the approach mentioned on another thread.  I had already installed WinXP on this computer, but only in a basic form; I was going to all this trouble because I didn't want to spend the time and effort to install all my Windows programs and configure them.  So far, that decision wasn't paying off.  But I thought perhaps I could copy the needed files from that existing basic Windows installation to my newly created Windows installation from the VM.  So I put the system back the way it was originally, without the new drive, and booted into Ubuntu.  I connected the new drive as an external USB drive and ran a file-comparison utility to see what was different between the files in the basic Windows XP installation and this new one.  (The utility I used was Beyond Compare.)  I really couldn't identify anything that I should be copying over from one to the other.

Collegedropout said that WinXP could have boot problems when the BIOS was set to recognize hard drives as "Auto."  The solution, s/he said, was to change it to "Large."  I tried that, and rebooted with only the new WinXP drive connected.  In my system's BIOS, this setting was located under Standard CMOS Features.  I had to hit Enter at each hard drive and then change Access Mode to Large.  This did not affect the problem, so I changed it back.

I was tempted to set up the Ubuntu dual-boot on the new drive and see if the Ubuntu bootloader would make any difference, but I decided there was probably no way around it:  I was going to have to figure out what they were talking about, when they referred to "chipset drivers."  I went into Device Manager to get the properties for the SATA hard drive controller (Start > Run > devmgmt.msc), but I didn't see it.  I did have the option of putting in a service request to Acronis, but at this ponit I decided I had invested enough time in this experiment.  I decided to just install WinXP manually on the new drive, and to see if I could return Acronis True Image Home 2011 and/or its Plus Pack for a refund.