Invalid drive letters when restoring via CD

I have dual boot laptop with the following partition layout:
D:\ Recovery
C:\ Partition_1
2 SUSE linux partitions

I ran backup for the drive using True Image 11 Home then deleted all partitions on the drive so I could test another operating system. When I finished testing, I once again deleted all partitions from the drive. I booted from the CD and restored the TI11 backup. Everything appeared to work as SUSE booted just fine. However, my Vista system would boot but very few functions worked. The drive letter assignments had been swapped to C:\ Recovery and D:\ Partition_1.
The Windows Disk Management function, where I would normally reassign drive letters, would not even activate.

The TI manual says to use the drop down to change letter assignments but the program on the boot CD does not offer this option.

Three days later I found got my system back. I reformatted the disk and used the boot CD to restore only the C:\ Partition_1 partition. I then ran TI from the Vista system and told it to restore the entire disk. I had my doubts TI would be able to restore to a live disk but I hoped TI would build a boot time recovery program and, low and behold, TI did ))

It took two restores; one of the C:\ partition, boot it and restore the entire disk but the drive letters were correct and I got my system back to exactly where it was )))

 

When you did the first restore, did you make sure the Vista partition was restored as an Active partition?

Was the first restore an Entire Disk Image restore (the Disk # checkbox checked) or did you restore the partitions separately?

 

I ran numerous restores of the entire disk and of selected partitions. All of the restores were run from the CD as I had no valid operating system on the hard disk. A entire disk image restore run from the CD to an empty hard disk always resulted in swapped C: and D: assignments. When I restore single partition restores, I was able to get Linux working or Vista but not both. When I ran a Vista partition restore by itself, I marked it as an active partition. This gave me a bootable C: partition running Vista but I had no D: and no Linux.

I then ran an entire disk image restore while the Vista was up and running on the disk I was attempting to restore to (my laptop has only one physical disk). I had little confidence this was going to work but after three days of effort I was willing to try. TI apparently built a boot time restore program. It worked and all drive letters were correct Something I was never able to get with a restore using the CD.

Original configuration:
D:\ Recovery
C:\ Partition_1
2 SUSE linux partitions

After restore of entire disk image using CD:
C:\ Recovery
D:\ Partition_1
2 SUSE linux partitions

What worked:
1. Erase all partitions
2. Restore only C: as active partition
3. Boot Vista from the C: drive
4. Run TI in Vista to restore the entire disk image
5. Vista rebooted and restored all partitions back to the original state.

 

Hello MountainMac and MudCrab,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

The full version of Acronis Bootable Rescue Media uses Linux environment. This results in the default Linux letter assignment rules, which may be different from the ones in Windows.

In MountainMac's case the simplest solution is start recovery from Windows (as you correctly did).

For detailed information we may recommend to check Chapter 2.1.1 Naming Convention

Thank you.
--
Alexander Nikolsky