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The Wonderful World of Bootable USB Acronis

Over the years, we’ve been able to assist many clients who wanted to maintain their operating system and/or program configuration, while moving to newer hardware.  This is accomplished through the wonderful invention called “Acronis Universal Restore”, which allows for an exact system image to be taken and transferred to dissimilar hardware.

Since many systems these days do not even have optical (CD/DVD) drives, we thought it would be a good idea to provide instructions for how to create Acronis bootable media on a USB (thumb/flash) drive.  This can be especially helpful when you pre-load the drivers that are specific to your system, to facilitate a speedier universal restore process:

1.  Format a USB Drive for FAT32 and download all chipset and network drivers from the manufacturer website
2.  Run Acronis Bootable Media Builder
3.  Select the bootable media type to create:  Bootable media type:  Default (Linux-based media) with Windows-like representation


4.  Select the components to place on the bootable media:  Acronis Backup & Acronis Universal Restore


5.  Select the media output:  USB Drive


6.  Specify Windows drivers for mass storage devices to add to the media.  The drivers will be used by Universal Restore.  Manually add all the drivers


7.  Create USB Disk
8.  Edit the following BIOS options:

  • Disable Secure Boot
  • Enable Legacy Mode
  • Enable Legacy Boot

9.  Restart computer and change the start up boot device (in BIOS) to Legacy: USB Storage Device
10.  Choose Acronis Backup and you are all set to get started creating back up images of your system!

by: Daniel Lin