Cloning and drive letters

My apologies for yet another cloning question! I really must bite the bullet and start doing it.

As you frequently reference Goodells article on drive letters, I decided to read it, and probably just as well. In the article it says:

Do not let old-XP see the new partition before cloning.
Doing so would give XP a chance to assign a drive letter, it will be remembered by the registry when it is cloned, and the clone will adopt the wrong drive letter for itself.

Now the new drive that I intend to clone to is currently in an internal enclosure and I have connected it to a USB 2.0 port on my PC, formatted it and given it a drive letter. Can I take it that I will run into the problems described by Goodells if I use it as the destination drive during cloning?

If so, what is the best way to deal with this problem? I'm reluctant to use Goodell's method number 2 as this involves serious registry changes (a google search found someone who had made the mistake of deleting the whole keys rather than their values, thus completely messing up his machine).

Can I use Disk Management in Administrative Tools? This allows both Remove (presumably the drive letter) under Change Drive Letter and Paths and Delete Partition. Would either of these solve the problem?

 

I have done Cloning to both internal and external drives and never bothered with the drive letters.
After the cloning process simply shutdown the system BEFORE trying to boot the cloned drive. Then connect the cloned drive in place of the original and restart the system.

 

Hello John Dalton,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please notice that clone operation erases the destination drive completely, so no data on previously assigned drive letters remains. Therefore, there is no problem in using a drive with assigned drive letter as a destination for cloning.

Follow Ralphie's advise and unplug one of the hard drives after the disk cloning process has been finished in order to prevent booting and drive letter assignment problems.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov