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Recovery Partition now has a drive letter

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A recovery partition I assume was made by Acronis has a drive letter (H:) and I can't remove it. When I look at it in Disk Management it doesn't show the drive letter. Is there a way to remove it?

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I tried to use diskpart to remove it but it doesn't show up. It doesn't show up in Disk Management.

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Michael, Acronis would never create any Recovery partition and given the size shown (14.85 GB) I would suggest that this is a Factory Restore partition installed by the PC vendor as have seen plenty of these on such as Dell PC's.

Download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software, install it then use the option the tool provides to 'Explore' the contents of this recovery partition and you will probably see archives used to put the PC back to how it was shipped to you from the factory. 

Hi Steve,

Yes you are right. It was a Dell partition. The MiniTool Partition Wizard is great. It let me remove the drive letter. Do you have any other recommendations for PC utilities? I came over from the Mac about a year ago so I am not informed on the latest and greatest software.

Thanks a lot,

Michael

Michael, in terms of other utilities it would really depend on what you are looking for?

What about Acronis Clone Disk? I am going to clone my existing drive and install a new one. Is Acronis Clone Disk good? Is there a better program?

The clone feature of ATI work fine for most people, especially if doing this on the same PC where ATI is installed, but as with all tools, it is strongly recommended to make a full disk backup before doing a clone.

From a personal point of view, I prefer to use Backup & Recovery rather than using Cloning, as the former is IMO safer by virtue of the original source working drive being safely removed from the PC when the Recovery is performed (using Acronis Rescue Media).

Steve,

Backup and recovery sounds like the smart way to go. This is the way I was going to do it.

1. Uninstall programs installed on D: drive (I ran out of room on C:)

2. Change default folders and save locations back to C:

3. Do a full disk backup

4. Swap out the 256GB NVMe for the 1TB NVMe (I only have one slot)

5. Boot off Rescue Media and use Backup & Recovery to restore to the 1TB

6. Re-install the programs I uninstalled from D: to the 1TB

Does that sound right?

Thanks,

Michael

Michael, your steps are correct but there is one additional action that is needed which is to confirm the BIOS mode used by your OS to boot the PC.  Given you are booting from NVMe disks this should be UEFI but to confirm this, run the msinfo32 command in Windows and look at the value shown for the BIOS mode in the right panel of the report produced.

Acronis Rescue Media can be booted in both Legacy and UEFI boot modes, so it is important that the correct mode be used (to match that of the OS) to avoid any change of boot mode in the recovery (or clone) process.

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

See also topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I documented the process that I used when upgrading my laptop NVMe SSD drive using Backup & Restore.

Hi Steve,

I just checked and the BIOS Mode is UEFI. How do you select the boot mode in Acronis Rescue Media?

Michael

Michael, the boot mode is selected from your BIOS menu options, not from the rescue media itself.

For a UEFI boot PC, then for Dell PC's you can normally press the F12 key on boot to show the boot override menu and you should select the option with UEFI shown against the device the media is stored on.

See examples below of how the boot options may be shown:

Got it. Thanks a lot for answering my questions. 

Michael