ATI v11 keeps changing my drive letters, WHY?

The restore runs under linux and that doesn't assign drive letters the same way the Windows does. Even the BIOS ignores lettering and uses numbers.

The reassignments are necessary to get things back the way you want them.

Windows checks a few things when it boots up, inlcuding a file journal to see if any files were left eopen or intended writes not completed, if it can't process those checks, it assumes something went wonky in the meantime. In your case, the wonk is doing a restoring which ends up with reassigned drive lertters. Go ahead and boot normal and use windows's disk manager to assign drive letters as you like.

Firstly, I am restoring images using an VistaPE boot CD which uses Windows drivers, with the Acronis free BartPE plugin. So I am not using Linux to restore at all as you are suggesting, so your answer makes no sense. In fact, Linux is never used at all during backup or restoring.

It's very annoying that it does it and I have to manually change D: back to F: and change F: back to D:

Paragon when restoring an image doesn't do it. So seeing Acronis is doing it, is no good.

Is there a solution to stop Acronis doing this?

Actually, the ansser makes sense-- I think what you meant to say it that it did not apply to your particular situation. ;)

In any event, sorry, I don't know why the PE version of Vista would assign drive letters differently than one of Windows's full OSs. I'm pretty sure they'd have to recode ATI to change this.

It hasn't happened on any of my systems; reassignments that happen is if I move a protable drive that has a drive letter previosuly assigned to it that is already in use on a win machine I thn connect it to.
The reassignments is happening only with logical drives on a single hdisk, it could be that you need to restore the partitons in a different order so that when windows finds them, it assigns drive letter IDs in the same order as it originally did -- that's just a guess but it would be easy enough try if, indeed, it applies to your case.

D: was always originally D: as it's my HP rescue partition that is activated when I press F11 during booting.

So there is no need or reason for Acronis to start changing it to F: when I restore an image.

Paragon doesn't do it, so why does Acronis?

In Windows' drive letters are kept in registry, so on reboot after a restore the drive letters should be as they were previously, unless as Scott says, Windows is confused by something on reboot which will make it alter the registry entries.

Is your image a complete disk or per partition?

Is the System partition included, it might be the BCD gets remade?

Hi Colin,

The image is my complete C: drive.

What do you mean is the system partition included? IN Acronis I just choose C: drive to backup and then I restore the image. How do you include the "system partition" whatever that is?

And why is the Acronis restore changing the drive letter arrangement in the Vista registry?

Depending on how you installed Vista you may or may not have a 100MB System Partition which contains the Vista booting information.

You will have this hidden partition (though it will show up in TIH) if you installed Vista natively, that is, not over the top of XP. If you installed over XP you won't have the separate partition.

It is possible that Windows is changing the partition lettering becuase it isn't seeing what it thinks it should be seeing. If you are just restoring the partition without the booting information, Windows and TIH will make up their own minds as to what you should see.

I bought a HP Laptop with Vista already on it. Never had XP at all.

may I add that whenever I restore an Acronis image and then load windows, the first time it loads it says that Windows was not shut down properly. maybe that has something to do with it? Why does the Acronis image do that?

Tony,

As Vista is already installed you should have a number of extra partitions (open up Windows Disk Manager - right click My Computer\Manager\Disk), there ought to be something along the lines of a system partition, your C: partition a tools partition and an HP recovery partition.

Making a complete disk image may solve the problem you are having. I suspect that there is some HP utility that runs in the background could be causing the 'not shutdown correctly' message.

I'm assuming you don't have Try and Decide running and that your Vista is at SP2 level.

At the very least include the System partition with your C:\ and see if that proble still exists.

A phsycal disk drive can be made up of more than one partition, each partition being treated by the operating system as a drive (also called a logical dirve). If you are backing up in disk mode then you get all the partitions, disk signature, mbd, the whole ball of wax.

Tony2012 wrote:

I bought a HP Laptop with Vista already on it. Never had XP at all.

May I add that whenever I restore an Acronis image and then load windows, the first time it loads it says that Windows was not shut down properly. maybe that has something to do with it? Why does the Acronis image do that?

I don't think this message is something you need to worry about. It's something you get from windows in certain situations even if one is not using ati. It's a flag from the system, part of the error handling, but more of an alert.

The drive letter reassignment seems more important to me since you are doing a disk mode backup and restore to the same physical disk. It's a fair question why doesn't ATI restore to "as was" condition?

Tony:

Windows 7 and Vista keep track of the running/shut-down status and will produce the error message "Windows was not shut down properly" when the actual state differs from the stored state.

This happens when restoring an image that was created while Windows was running. When you create an image this way, Windows is running and the image contains the status "running". When you then restore this image and boot into it for the first time, Windows checks the status and sees that it differs from what it's supposed to be. This isn't harmful and you only see the message when booting into a restored image for the first time.

You can avoid this by creating the image from the boot CD while Windows is shut down. The first time you boot an image created this way the stored status (shut down) and the actual status are the same, so there won't be an error message.

But I created the Acronis Image from within Vista whilst Windows Vista was running, and then running Acronis Trueimage to create an image. So why does Vista create an image from within Vista that later when is restored will say "Windows has not shut down properly. Would you like to start in Safe Mode or Normal mode etc"?

Mark, that's annoying to have to reboot everytime into the boot CD I want to create an image. I love the convenience of creating images from within windows. So why bother installing ATI on Vista in the first place then? :(

Paragon doesn't give that error message when booting the restored image for the first time so why does ATI?

Also, is there a way to stop the restored image from changing my D: drive to F: and F: from D:?

Is that also caused by creating an image from within Vista using ATI whilst Vista is running?

Because when you restore Vista the boot flag tells the system it is in 'run' state (it was in 'run' state when you made the image), but the booting of Windows from a restored image is from cold, so when the boot loader checks the boot flag that says 'run' when it should say 'shutdown', Windows then assumes it has not been shut down properly and that there could be a system problem.

For some reason this only happens occasionally with Windows 7, but is more frequent with Vista, something i'd forgotten.

Ok thank you Colin, now I know what causes that to occur and how to avoid it. I will uninstall ATI from Vista then as I don't need it anymore, and whenever I need to do a backup, I will boot the rescue CD instead to avoid seeing that error boot message.

So now back to my other problem. Whenever I restore and Vista loads, it has swapped and changed my drive letters, Drive D: is changed to drive F: and F: is changed to drive D:

I then need to load "Manage" / "Disk Management" and change them back to their original drive letter.

How do I avoid having to do that? Is there a solution for this as well? Is that happening also because I been creating images from WITHIN Vista as Vista is running? Is the solution to create an image from the Boot CD? Will that fix it?

Tony:

You don't have to give up creating images from within Windows but you will have to ignore the "Windows was not shut down properly" error message upon the first boot into a restored image. You can ignore this message - it's harmless. I don't know how Paragon Backup gets around this unless they fiddle with the boot status flag upon restoration.

To help us understand your other problem could you post a screen shot from Windows Disk Management console showing the partition layout? Type "partition" into the Vista Start/Search box and choose "Create and format hard disk partitions" from the list of search hits. When Disk Management console opens, type "snip" into the Start/Search box to open the Snipping Tool. Save a copy of the Disk Managment window and attach it to your next post.

Then describe precisely how you create your backup image and how you restore it. Do this with as much detail as possible. The details may help us see what's going on.

I am going to test this. I am going to boot the CD, and create an image instead of creating the image within Vista, and then restore the image and see if it alters my D: and F: drives. If it doesn't then I will know that to fix the Windows error message and to stop D: and F: changing, the solution is to create images from boot CD and NOT from within Vista.

Will report back as soon as I get around to creating image from boot CD and restoring it.

I no longer get the Windows error page and drives D: and F: no longer swap around.

What I did was, I uninstalled Acronis Windows program and DO NOT create images from within Windows as windows is running. Instead I boot the Acronis boot CD and create the image from the boot CD instead. And then when I boot the rescue CD and restore that image, everything restores and works fine.

So obviously, the problems happen when using Acronis windows program and creating images from within windows as windows is running.

So I recommend others to NOT DO THAT, instead create images from booting the rescue CD instead. That way windows is closed and not running when creating an image...and then the restoring of the image works better and doesn't confuse and mess around with windows.