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Can't Change Backup Drive Letter

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Have a backup made from my computer before the mbr got messed up. Part of the issue was that the mess was made as part of attempting to change from mbr to gpt. Anyway, I was unable to get any restores, or anything useful, to run even when at a command prompt before boot. This is all in windows 10.

The tack I'm on now is that I've replaced my old boot SSD (with the messed up mbr/gpt) with an older, known good HDD, and installed ATI 2019 on it. My backup was made with ATI 2019 to USB drive M:. Now ATI is stuck in a mode where I can't change the target drive from M: to anything else. The actual backup (now J:) is visible in diskmanager, and in file explorer. 

So, the issue now is that I can't change the J: backup drive to M: in windows, and I can't change the M: backup destination in ATI to anything else at all; it is stuck at M: for all operations.

ATI comes up with the reconfigure button active, but clicking on it yields "Failed to open item M:\...". (Knowledge base says no information on this error.) Clicking on recovery yields "Failed to check last versions of the backup", with again no info in the knowledge base.

There are no other USB drives mounted other than the actual backup that shows as J:. Nor are there any M: drives visible in diskmanager, nor file explorer.

Any suggestions welcome.

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Progress.

Succeeded in changing the drive letter to the correct M: using a command window and diskpart. But ATI still can't find the correct file name, even though it does find the backup drive now.

When I click on recover, I get the "cannot find..." error as before, but now with the opportunity to browse for the file. When I browse to the correct file on the backup drive and click add, nothing changes.

Suggestions?

Dave, what are you trying to do here with this backup?

If you are trying to recover the backup to the changed HDD drive, then you should not be doing this from within Windows, but rather, you should boot the computer from the Acronis Rescue Media with your backup drive connected.

If want the backup to remain as MBR when recovered to the HDD then boot the rescue media in Legacy / MBR BIOS mode, otherwise, if you want to migrate the backup from MBR to UEFI / GPT, then boot the rescue media in UEFI mode which will perform the migration as part of the recovery.

Note: drive M: is used by Acronis Drive for Mobile Backups and is normally a hidden drive created by Acronis using subst under the covers.

If you are wanting to continue your Backup task on your USB drive, then I would suggest not using drive M: (because of the Acronis Drive use) but allocate a different letter further along the alphabet by going into Windows Disk Management to do this, then use the 'Clone settings' option for your backup task in the ATI GUI to make a copy of your task, then remove the original task, then configure the cloned task to use the new drive letter for your USB drive as the destination, but give the task a different name, as it will start creating backup files from _full_b1_s1_v1.tib

Steve, thanks for the reply.

Your first two paragraphs are what I ended up doing. My system is now restored. 

My M:, I discovered, was taken by one of the built-in SD card readers on my system, assigned at boot. I will take your advise and change my backup drive to something else.

Now, about changing from MBR to UEFI/GPT. I didn't know that ATI rescue would do that. If I had known, I would have chosen that mode when I restored.

I am currently using the MBR. What is your recommendation to change everything over to UEFI/GPT. I have Acronis Disk Director 12.5, but it isn't showing me the ability to change the boot partition to GPT. Does that change if I run it at boot? And, does it do the job without any loss of data?

Dave,

Personally, since you know you can restore your image as is, go back and do it again, but boot the rescue media in UEFI mode and then do the restore. Afterwards, boot into the bios and make sure that it is UEFI configured and the disk is the first UEFI priority.  That should do it in most cases.

Alternatively, Windows 10 can actually do this natively with some commands.  I've never tried myself, but there's a pretty good tutorial at:  

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/81502-convert-windows-10-legacy-bios-uefi-without-data-loss.html

Just make sure you have a good backup (safely tucked away and on standby) in case it doesn't work if you try this route.

Dave, in addition to the advice from Rob (Bobbo), if you go the UEFI Restore method, then given you already have the original SSD drive where you say the MBR is messed up, then would suggest repeating the restore in UEFI mode to that SSD drive and leaving your working HDD as it is.  Swap the HDD out and the SSD in and leave the HDD on a shelf as a working backup.

Note: In the BIOS when using UEFI boot mode, you should have Windows Boot Manager selected as the boot priority device, not the physical drive.