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True Image 2106 will not restore PC from USB on which backup is located because the USB drive letter is different

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I had a major problem yesterday and finally decided I just need to restore my notebook from my Acronis True Image backup. So I plugged in the USB drive where I keep the back up and hit restore PC.

I got an error message that basically said can't find the backup on H:/Seagate Backup USB. I looked in windows explorer and for some reason it assigned the letter I: instead of H:. OK - I see I can change the "destination" location on that page, so I changed it to I:/Seagate Backup USB. It saw the drive and was happy about that. However, it still has in it's settings somewhere that my backup is on H:\Seagate Backup USB and gives me the same error. 

I can't find anywhere in the program where to simply change where the program looks for the backup. This is enough to make me change backup programs, as I'm already very frustrated since my laptop is having issues, and all I want to do is plug in the USB drive where the backkup is and restore my PC.

Where is the option to look somewhere else for the backup? 

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Jeffrey, welcome to these user forums.

From your description you are attempting to perform the restore of your notebook by starting this from within the Windows Acronis application.  This in turn will require the notebook to be rebooted into a Linux environment from which to launch the Acronis restore operation, but it also uses information in the Acronis database which is where the drive letter details are coming from.

The recommendation here is to always use the Acronis bootable Rescue Media to do this type of operation - this is created on either CD/DVD or USB stick media and you use this to boot the notebook completely outside of Windows where it doesn't care about the Acronis database at all, but will just use the backup image file that you point it at on your USB backup drive.

The Rescue media comes in two different flavours, the Standard media is again Linux based and should work on most systems, but there is also a Windows PE flavour of the Rescue Media which is needed for some newer systems, especially those with some of the latest NVMe or M.2 SSD drives installed.

You should try using the Standard Rescue Media first time and if this can see your USB drive and restore the backup to your internal drive then there is no need to consider the alternative WinPE media.

Steve, thanks for the feeback. Somehow I missed finding this in any documentation with the program.

Since the laptop is still running at the moment, sounds like I need to immediately make a Standard rescue media USB and a Windows PE one (USB sticks are inexpensive!) Maybe a couple of each and store them in the safe place I store my USB backup drive.

Thanks very much!

Jeffrey, no problem with the feedback, glad to offer help.

If you are looking at the WinPE USB Rescue Media, then please see the MVP Tool - Custom ATI WINPE BUILDER tool (link in my signature) as this creates a much more useful version of the rescue media and incorporates (if you choose to do so) a web browser, file manager etc, plus it can also make both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.  I have the 32-bit media created because I have an older Samsung Netbook (NC10) which has a 32-bit Atom processor and this works great on that, plus it will also work equally well on 64-bit systems.

The default Acronis WinPE media made directly from the application can only create the 64-bit media.

You shouldn't need to have both the Standard (Linux) media and also the WinPE media unless you have some Ubuntu or other Linux flavour systems you want to use the former for to backup offline.