Recovering your system

Once you have performed the steps described in Preparing for recovery, begin the system recovery procedure. Here we will explain how to recover a corrupted system to the same hard disk. System recovery to a replaced hard disk drive will be similar with some minor differences. You do not need to format the new disk, as this will be done in the process of recovery.

Attach the external drive if it contains the backup to be used for recovery and make sure that the drive is powered on. This must be done before booting from Acronis rescue media.

  1. Arrange the boot order in BIOS so as to make your rescue media device (CD, DVD or USB stick) the first boot device. See Arranging boot order in BIOS.
  2. Boot from the rescue media and select Acronis True Image Home 2011 (Full version).
  3. Select My disks below Recover on the Welcome screen.
  4. Select the system disk or partition backup image to be used for recovery.

    Right-click on the backup and choose Recover in the shortcut menu.

    If Windows and the recovery environment assign different disk letters, the program will display the following error message:

    “Acronis True Image Home 2011 cannot detect volume N of “Name” archive”

    where Name is the name of the required image backup and volume number (N) may be different depending on the number of backups in the archive.

    Click Browse and show the path to the backup.

  5. Select Recover whole disks and partitions at the Recovery method step.
  6. Select the system partition (usually C) on the What to recover screen. If the system partition has a different letter, select the partition using the Flags column. It must have the Pri, Act flags.

    In case of Windows 7 the System Reserved partition will have the Pri, Act flags . You will need to select for recovery both the System Reserved partition and the System partition.

  7. At the “Settings of partition C” (or the letter of the system partition, if it is different) step check the default settings and click Next if they are correct. Otherwise, change the settings as required before clicking Next. Changing the settings will be needed when recovering to the new hard disk of a different capacity.
  8. Carefully read the summary of operations at the Finish step. If you have not resized the partition, the sizes in the Deleting partition and Recovering partition items must match. Having checked the summary click Proceed.
  9. When the operation finishes, exit the standalone version of Acronis True Image Home 2011, remove the rescue media and boot from the recovered system partition. After making sure that you have recovered Windows to the state you need, restore the original boot order.

Recovering your system