For several years the company has been constantly improving the Adaptive Restore Technology which is intended to solve all issues with dissimilar hardware restore and migration. Its goal is to help you make an operating system functional again after any complex hardware replacement like installing a new motherboard or RAID controller.
The first version of Adaptive Restore supported only Vista and Windows 2008 operating systems due to use of a very simple adaptation algorithm. In short: because of the fact that these OS’s have many hardware drivers on board but in the inactive state the program just only activated them during adaptation assuming that it will make an OS bootable. There was not any possibility to add third-party drivers. The lack of this approach was obvious: some important drivers may not be found or adaptation should affect deep system layers. So the next version of Adaptive Restore was able to change OS core settings and install any additional drivers.
After several revisions Adaptive Restore become what it is now, a complicated technology with many background manipulations.
What makes Adaptive Restore Tick
Basically there are two main operations. First of all the program adjusts the OS kernel including proper HAL selection. Secondly the program installs any additional drivers. Now Adaptive Restore supports modern Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 7 operating systems alongside with deprecated Windows 2000 and going out of date Windows XP/Windows 2003.
Adaptive Restore is intended to be both simple and comprehensive. It usually doesn’t demand special attention or manual actions during the operation set up, but informs you about any hardware without properly installed drivers. Inexperienced users can completely rely on the internal Adaptive Restore algorithm during the operation when others, who feels themselves skilled enough, are able to change Adaptive Restore behavior.
If you choose a simple scenario you will need only to pass a path to the drivers’ repository in the program. There is no limit to amount of these repositories; the program will scan them all while searching for appropriate drivers. If the program fails it will ask you to provide a path to another repository. The lack of this scenario is that you cannot control which driver will be actually installed.
A long but detailed and interesting way to bring your system back on rails is to use the advanced Adaptive Restore scenario. In this case the program will provide you with additional Adaptive Restore parameters and tuning. First of all in this scenario you can see all the information about the hardware which drivers have to be installed for in an easy to understand manner with device names.
Look at the list of found hardware. You can see properly configured hardware, devices without drivers and absent hardware with installed drivers for it.
Here you can install the needed drivers separately. It is very handy if you by some reason have to install the particular version of the driver. If you want install drivers as usual from the repository, Adaptive Restore can be configured to force injection of all drivers for your hardware from the given driver repository, even if there are already installed drivers for some hardware with options either to keep the latest version of drivers during the forced re-injection or not. In case Adaptive Restore doesn’t find any appropriate drivers anywhere in Windows or manually configured repositories it will ask you again to provide the needed files.
The driver installation dialog window.
In any case after the completion of the Adaptive Restore operation you will get your operating system functional and bootable on any dissimilar hardware. Besides the previously described scenario of data restore after the hardware disaster there are many other cases when Adaptive Restore can be very useful.
Adaptive Restore helps fix problems with other Backup Software
For example Adaptive Restore can help you to recover your operating system after its restore on different hardware, which was performed by third-party backup software (Acronis, Symantec, O&O, EMC etc.). As there are very few comparable with Adaptive Restore solutions from other vendors on the market, a much less that simply backup/restore programs, you may be given with an archive, created by one of such applications. After its restore you’ll anyway have to perform Adaptive Restore.
Adaptive Restore and Virtualization
Another possible Adaptive Restore implementation intersects with the main modern IT trend – virtualization. At some time you may want or be faced with the need to transfer you actual physical system into a hood of a virtual machine. Beside of traditional migration you can use an archive of your physical system. Just create a virtual machine, restore data from the archive, perform Adaptive Restore and you’ll have the virtual clone of your system.
Paragon Adaptive Technology can be found in a new version of Paragon Drive Backup solution. However many early versions of Adaptive Restore are in such products as Paragon Virtualization Manager 2010, Paragon Drive Backup 10, Paragon Drive Copy 10, Hard Disk Manager 2010 etc as the P2P Adjust Wizard in the windows installed program or inside a bootable recovery environment (WinPE).