Create Acronis Survival Kit bootable media using Acronis True Image (Cyber ​​Protect Home Office)

4. Restore your PC from your external hard drive via Acronis Survival Kit

Assuming that your computer no longer boots because of a problem with your Windows installation, back up your important data using a live CD (such as "HBCD PE" for recent PCs or "HBCD" for older PCs).
Then, once the important data is backed up on a disk other than the one where Windows is located, boot from your external hard drive (where you just created the "Acronis Survival Kit" bootable media) by configuring the boot order of your motherboard BIOS to boot from your external hard drive first.
It is also possible that a keyboard shortcut allows you to access the boot menu of your motherboard (depending on its brand).

If your computer boots to your external hard drive, you will see the Windows logo appear.
Again, this is due to the use of a Windows PE environment to allow you to use a program for Windows without requiring your regular Windows installation to still be running.

When starting the Windows PE environment, you will see a command prompt (cmd.exe) like below with 2 commands.

The "wpeinit" command which is necessary for the operation of Plug-and-Play (PnP) devices in the Windows PE environment, as well as for processing the settings located in the "Unattended.xml" file located at the root of the special partition "Acronis Survival Kit" and for network resources.

Batch

wpeinit

The command below simply launches the lightweight program "Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image)" in this Windows PE environment.

Batch

"X:\Program Files\Acronis\CyberProtectHomeOffice\trueimage_starter.exe"

Note: It is normal for no taskbar to appear at the bottom of your screen.
Windows PE does not have a taskbar by default. Although some Windows PE-based live CDs do display one.

Source : Wpeinit and Startnet.cmd: Using WinPE Startup Scripts | Microsoft Learn.

In the "Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image)" window that appears, click "Restore".

You will arrive in the "Restore" section of the "Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image)" program where you can see the list of disk backups already existing on the physical disks (hard drives or SSDs) of your computer.
In this case, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) detects our full backup "INFORMATIWEB-PC" stored on our external hard drive (whose path is "D:\INFORMATIWEB-PC.tibx").

To restore an Acronis backup, click on "Disk Restore".

Select the backup you want to use to restore your computer from, then click "Next".
In this case, there is only one and it is therefore necessarily a full backup.

Note: if you back up your computer several times, the following backups of this same computer will be incremental backups.
If you restore an incremental backup, Acronis will use this incremental backup, as well as all the incremental backups that precede it, as well as the full backup (which is the base).
Your computer will therefore be restored to the desired state (of the chosen incremental backup, but which depends on the previous backups for some data).

To completely restore your computer, select the "Restore entire disks and partitions" restore method.

Select the date and time to which you want to restore your computer (using this backup).
The available dates and times obviously correspond to the date and time of each backup available for your computer.
In this case, there is only one.

Select the disks (contained in the chosen backup) that need to be restored.

In our case, we restore disk 1 (because it is the one that contains the Windows partition (C:), as well as the system partitions necessary for Windows to function (EFI System Partition / Recovery Partition).
Note that restoring the disk will also restore the boot information located in the MBR and telling your computer which partition it should boot from.

Next, select the physical disk on your computer to which you want to restore the previously selected disk.
In our case, disk 1 of the backup will therefore be restored to the physical disk 1 of our computer.

Notes:

• when you select one of your physical disks in the list, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) displays the partitions currently present on it.
• as you can see from the "Interface" column, disk 1 is an internal physical disk (Serial ATA = SATA) and disk 2 corresponds to our external hard drive connected via USB.

Warning : as Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) tells you:

• the chosen destination disk contains partitions (which is normal since you want to restore this disk to its previous state thanks to your backup).
• the partitions present on the chosen destination disk will be erased and the data on them will therefore be permanently lost.
  Especially since rewriting the backup data on this disk will prevent you from using data recovery software to recover the data that was previously present on this physical disk.

Confirm the deletion of these partitions by clicking "OK" to authorize the restoration of the backup on this physical disk.

A summary of the operations that will be performed appears.
In summary: erasing the previously selected destination physical disk, then creating the partitions present in the backup on this destination disk to restore your computer.

Click "Run".

Please wait while your computer is being restored.

Plain Text

Restoring...

Note that you can choose to automatically restart or shut down your computer once the restoration is complete by checking the appropriate box if you wish:

• Restart the computer when the operation is completed.
• Turn off the computer when the operation is completed.

Once the restoration is complete, the message "Restore operation successful" will appear.
Simply click "OK" to close this small window.

Note: if you had checked one of the 2 boxes mentioned above, a timer of a few seconds will appear with this message.
Then, once the time has elapsed, this message will disappear and the desired action (restart or shutdown of your computer) will be carried out.

Close the "Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image)" window by simply clicking on the cross at the top right.

Also close the command prompt in the same way.
After a few seconds, your computer will restart automatically.

Make sure that your motherboard BIOS is set to boot from the hard drive where Windows is installed and not your external hard drive.
If needed, refer to the tutorial mentioned above (at step "4. Restore your PC from your external hard drive via Acronis Survival Kit" of this tutorial).