Considerations before conversion

Converting a UEFI-based machine

If the original machine uses Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) for booting, consider creating a virtual machine that is also UEFI-based.

If your virtualization product does not support UEFI, you can create a BIOS-based machine, provided that the original machine is running Windows. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 adjusts the Windows boot mode to the BIOS boot firmware and ensures that Windows remains bootable.

For Linux operating systems, changing the boot mode from UEFI to BIOS is not supported. Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 can convert a UEFI-based machine running Linux only when the machine uses GRUB version 1 and the target machine is also UEFI-based. For more details, see "Support for UEFI-based machines".

Choosing the disk interface

When creating the virtual machine, you may want its disks to have a different interface than those of the original machine.

• You may want to change all disk interfaces from IDE to SCSI when migrating a machine to ESX(i), because SCSI is a default disk interface for ESX(i) and it provides better performance.
• You need to change the system disk interface from SCSI to IDE when migrating a machine to Hyper-V, because Hyper-V does not support booting from SCSI disks.

If the original machine uses a custom boot loader, either recover the system disk to a disk with the same interface, or manually configure the boot loader. The reason is that when the interface of the system disk changes, the name of the boot device also changes; however, the boot loader still uses the old name. Configuring GRUB is normally not needed because Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 does this automatically.