My brother-in-law has an old (8 yrs) Gateway desktop. The hard drive needs to be replaced. Can he just put in a new drive and use an Acronis boot disk to restore his old drive from a back up that's on an external drive? If so, would anything have to be done with the new drive before hand? BTW, the boot disk he has was made from an Acronis True Image Home 2011 installation on his laptop running Win 7. The desktop backup is of a Win XP OS that had the same version of Acronis. Is this a problem? And no, I don't why he didn't make a boot disk for his desktop!
Acronis does it quite easily but this is for windows 7. Perhaps you can initialise the disk beforehand in windows 7 and keep 1 partition. Then delete that volume, boot from acronis, select the image, and just restore to the new disk. It will take up exactly as much partition size as on the image (total and not used, thus if partition size is 50GB but used is 20GB, acronis will take 50GB). The balance is unallocated after restore. Just format and partition that unallocated partition. Of course there are easier ways in Acronis (cloning etc) but I do it this way. Done it so many times not for installing new hard disks, but for swapping OS across hard disks. That did involve some copying data across disks but nothing that a few hours would not accomplish.