answer:Yes, it can. 1) – You have to have a bootable disk (cd or dvd) on which the acronis software has already been loaded. (It can be a disk provide by acronis, if you bought it in a box at a retail outlet, or it can be a disk you created with a feature provided in the software, if you downloaded the software from their web site.) 2) – You also have to have previously created an image backup of the original hard drive using the “disk clone” mode wizard. If your backup image was not “sector-by-sector”, using this disk cloning mode, you cannot do a bare-metal restore. The new hard drive does not need to be the same size as the old one, which means you can upgrade to a larger, newer hard drive without losing ANYthing on your smaller, older hard drive. The new hard drive does not even need to be partitioned or formatted: acronis sees all and knows all!