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Can't choose C: as as logical drive letter on recover

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I run an Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office 2021 for backup. I have a backup including C: and track 0 from august. When I try to recover to an empty disk, I can't choose C: as logical drive letter for the Windows partition. First available was D:. Later I tried running the recover one more time. Now first available letter is H:. I can't recover the windows installation partition as C:. When booting the computer again, it says the boot is corrupt and I should use repair tools. I have no repair tool that solves the issue. The basic problem is that I can't set the correct drive letter for the boot partition. And why has it changed the second time I run?

Why?

 

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Hakan, welcome to these public User Forums.

When you are booted into any Acronis rescue media or environment to perform a recovery, drive letters are not the same as they are in Windows, so it is correct / normal for drive C: to be allocated to any other drive present or to the rescue media etc.

You do not need to be able to set the correct drive letter for the boot partition, Acronis does this automatically.

On most Windows PC's having only a backup of the Windows C: partition and Track 0 is not normally sufficient to allow for a successful recovery - there should be other hidden / system partitions present that are required by Windows to boot successfully.

On a UEFI boot system, then you should have an EFI System Partition plus a small Microsoft system reserved and also a Recovery partition.

On a Legacy boot system, then the Microsoft System Reserved partition performs the role of the EFI partition in holding the Windows Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store.

How the recovery is performed is also important - the rescue media needs to be booted in the same BIOS boot mode as the Windows OS uses.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 69472: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: how to create bootable media

KB 69427: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

Thanks for the answer.

I want to recover my C drive and track 0 from a backup on an external USB drive. The "auto" setting on drive C drive letter doesn't work so I'm trying to hard-set the drive letters.

I know they are different environments, the recover and the normal running. Why is then the available device letters for the running environment setup according to the recover environment? Now it set drive letters as used in parameter setting for a recovery when they are used in the recover environment. That doesn't seem correct because it's not the same environment.

Let me explain.When I set parameters for drive C recovery, I can't choose drive letter C because it's used by the recover boot USB memory stick. But the recover USB drive will not be there with drive letter C when I boot up my recovered Win. So why this mix of drive letters in recover environment and running environment when it's two completely different situation?

Or am I completely missing something?

Windows drive letter assignments are determined by a combination of the physical drive that the OS is installed on and the hardware placement (SATA controller and port).

The recovery media OS uses its own rules for allocating drive letters which are often different to how letters are assigned in Windows.

The key factor here is to restore your backup image to the correct target drive and ensure that the PC BIOS boot settings are correctly pointing to the correct drive (Legacy boot) or to the Windows Boot Manager from the correct drive (UEFI boot).

It doesn't matter that the Recovery media environment shows a different drive letter than C: when doing the restore - this will be resolved by the OS when it boots.