AOMEI Backupper Help Guides

What does universal restore can do for you? 

The feature, Universal Restore in AOMEI Backupper, allows you to restore operating system (OS) to a computer with dissimilar hardware. So you can recover your OS instantly in case of hardware failure and deploy the same operating system to many computers. You can also use it for other purpose, such as physical-to-virtual or virtual-to-physical migration.

To restore system to dissimilar hardware, you must ensure the items in the following.

1. You need to have a bootable media of AOMEI Backupper. (See Creating AOMEI Backupper bootable media.) If you don’t have a bootable media or the target computer doesn’t offer ports to insert a media, you can also use PXE Boot Tool to do the restoration. See How to use Aomei PXE Boot Tool?

2. You have prepared a system backup image before, and you can use Backupper to find the image file easily. If not, please make a system backup now. See System Backup.

How to restore system to dissimilar hardware effortlessly

Step 1. Boot into AOMEI Backupper WinPE/Linux system using bootable media or PXE boot tool. 

Step 2. In the left tab page, select Restore, and then click Select Task to locate the system image file. 

Step 3. The system images will be listed in the window, please select a backup image to restore, then click Next.

Step 4. Select entire backup and destination location to store the image.

Step 5. Review Operation Summary Window. Please make sure that the option Universal Restore in the lower left corner is checked if you restore system image to dissimilar hardware, otherwise it will not be able to boot after restoring.

Step 6. Click Start Restore to perform the operation.

For further details with screenshots, see How to restore operating system to dissimilar hardware.

Notes:

• The system image cannot be restored to the drive where you save it. And all data on the selected drive will be formatted.

• After restoring Windows to a computer with dissimilar hardware completely, you may need to reactivate Windows and other softwares.

• Some drivers, like video/sound card drivers, display driver, NIC drivers etc, are not installed by AOMEI Universal Restore. As these drivers will not affect system startup, you can install them manually after restoring successfully.