30 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2015
For details about transferring Windows machines between UEFI and BIOS, see "Recovering
BIOS-based systems to UEFI-based or vice versa" (p. 115).
Limitations
WinPE-based bootable media of a version earlier than 4.0 do not support UEFI booting.
Acronis Active Restore (p. 235) is not available on UEFI machines.
Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (ASRM) (p. 235) on UEFI machines can be activated only in
Windows.
3.10 Support for Windows 8
This section describes how Acronis Backup supports features that are introduced in the Windows 8
operating system.
The information in this section also applies to Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
Limitations
Acronis Disk Director Lite (p. 179) is not available under Windows 8.
Disk management operations under bootable media may work incorrectly if storage spaces are
configured on the machine.
The Windows To Go feature of Windows 8 is not supported.
WinPE 4.0 and WinPE 5.0
Acronis Media Builder can create bootable media based on these versions of Windows Preinstallation
Environment (WinPE).
These bootable media support new features of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 (see later in
this section). They can boot on machines that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).
To create bootable media based on these versions of WinPE, you need Windows Assessment and
Deployment Kit (ADK). For more details, see the “WinPE-based bootable media” (p. 171) section.
UEFI Secure Boot
On a machine that runs Windows 8 and uses UEFI, the Secure Boot feature of UEFI may be turned on.
Secure Boot ensures that only trusted boot loaders can boot the machine.
By using Acronis Media Builder, you can create a bootable media that has a trusted boot loader. To
do this, choose to create a 64-bit Linux-based media or a 64-bit media based on WinPE 4 or later.
Storage spaces
In Windows 8, you can combine several physical disks into a storage pool. In this storage pool, you
can create one or more logical disks, called storage spaces. As with ordinary disks, storage spaces can
have volumes.
In Windows 8 and under a bootable media based on WinPE 4 or later, you can back up and recover
storage spaces. To recover a storage space to an ordinary disk or vice versa, use bootable media
based on WinPE 4 or later.
Linux-based bootable media does not recognize storage spaces. It backs up the underlying disks
sector-by-sector. If you recover all of the underlying disks to the original disks, the storage spaces will
be recreated.
