Wrong Partition Letter

Hi all.

I'm running TI9 v3677 on my fast laptop with two externally connected USB drives. One is my external F drive. The other is a temporary USB enclosure with my desktop's internal hard drive in it.

I restored my desktop's image from drive F to its internal hard drive mounted in the temporary USB enclosure. I could not assign C as the drive letter because it was not available to select. I chose Z as a temporary letter.

I put the internal drive back into the desktop computer but it won't boot because it's drive letter is now Z.

Could someone please help instruct me as to how I can change the drive letter from Z to C so it will boot?

I need to be able to do so while the drive is mounted in the desktop. Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

 

A similar posting:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=173485#2

 

Thanks for the pointer.

So, according to that post and my personal experience, Acronis ALLOWS you to restore an image like I did and the result is a drive that won't boot so the restore is USELESS as a boot drive......?

Why would Acronis allow an action like this that's guaranteed to fail and impossible to fix?

 

If you have a backup taken when the drive was in the desktop as C, then you can restore that backup and your desktop drive will still be C.

 

That's Right.

I removed the drive so I could do the restore much faster in my laptop....3 minutes vs. 4 hours in the desktop.

But the point is, why does Acronis allow for a restore that can't work? At very least there should be a statement accompanying the user docs clarifying that Acronis can only do LIMITED restores, etc. and CANNOT be used to restore as I and others have wasted time trying.

 

Is the clue in?

The drive should be in the desktop and TI booted from the rescue CD, surely if another drive is in the desktop and assigned as C:\ it is impossible to do a successful restore.

 

So you say. Why doesn't the user manual explain that Acronis can only do LIMITED restores?

The point you miss is there are people like me who will try what I did because it's faster than what you suggest.

A program's user docs should specify IN ADVANCE what can and cannot be done by a user. We shouldn't have to find out the hard way that a sensible use of the program results in a complete waste of time, just because the developers overlooked the program's known limitations in the user manual.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

 

I think that you can fix the problem providing that you have another way of changing the drive letter (Acronis Disk Director, for example). It would be helpful if Acronis provided such a capability in TI.

Pete K

 

Good News, no thanks to Acronis, but others may benefit from this experience....

1) First, I wanted to restore an image of my desktop's hard drive but not while the drive was in the desktop. It takes more than 4 hours in this older machine and only about 15 minutes from my fast laptop.

2) I removed the drive and connected it as a USB external drive to my fast laptop.

3) I booted my laptop and restored the desktop's image to the desktop's drive. However, Acronis would not let me restore the image's C partition as C on the externally connected desktop drive so I chose Z instead. The reason I could not select C during restore is because Acronis was running from my laptop which is the C partition so it was not available for this kind of operation even though the external drive was going back into the desktop as soon as it was restored.

4) According to Microsoft's Knowledge Base, once a drive letter is assigned to a partition which is the active partition containing the O/S, it can no longer be changed or the O/S won't work properly. I had assigned Z from my laptop so I knew the desktop drive would not boot after I reinstalled it in the desktop machine.

Well, here's the Good News . . .

Although my laptop would always remember this externally connected desktop drive as Z because that's what Acronis allowed me to select during the restore, after I reinstalled it in the desktop machine and booted it up, the desktop properly saw it as the C drive and the C partition as was created in the original imaging operation.

The Acronis assignment of Z during the restore as I had done it was thankfully NOT transferred to the externally connected desktop drive. That allowed it to boot as the C drive once reinstalled in the desktop machine.

THAT'S THE WAY THIS SOFTWARE SHOULD WORK FOR US! Unfortunately, the Acronis manual doesn't document any of this information in any useful way. That's why I posted it here. Maybe someone else would want to do what I did.

Thanks for all the comments, by the way. It would have been nice for someone from Acronis to clarify or comment before now since this is supposed to be the Official Acronis Support Forum and I'm a paying customer . . . :-(

 

I had a similar experience.
I don't exactly remember how it happened, but my drive C became unallocated (no drive letter).
I booted up to the bootable recovery CD to run the recovery, and Acronis saw the CD as drive C.
So I had the CD as drive C and the second partition on the hard drive as drive D.
I have the partitions labeled "Partition-1" and "Partition-2" so it's easy to keep track of them.
And just for the sake of mentioning it, I have my external HD labeled "USB-DRIVE".
So I try to give myself a lesser margin for making mistakes.
I got pretty worried at that point, but I decided to let the restore go to the unallocated space and use the next available drive letter, which was E.
On completion, when I restarted the computer, it booted up properly, and that drive E actually became drive C.
That was a scary learning experience, but at least it worked.