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ATI Home 2010: after restore c: (System), the drive letters D and E are swapped/switched/reversed.

Thread needs solution

Hello and thank you for reading this question,

This item could have been discussed earlier, but most of them were about the system-partition being re-lettered.

My setup:
More that one physical drive (3)
The first one has 3 primary partitions on it.
Letters C, D and E.
These letters were seen and configured in my Windows 7 x64 SP1, which is on C-disk
Then I backuped the system partition only.
I could use the system for a while, very happy with it.

When I restore it, the drives D and E are reversed.
Some apps on C-disk rely on data being stored on D-disk. Now that cannot be found because of the reverse.
I can change that in the Disk Management of Windows 7, but I would rather want to know what the cause could be, and even more important, how I can avoid this.

Anyone who can and wants to help me on this?

Thanks a lot.

Sincerely,

Kees

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Are you sure? I've done plenty of C: partition restores on my multi-partition Win7 PC, and restoring just C: has never affected D: or E:.

You should add a recognizable label to every disk, so you can uniquely identify it without the drive letter. When recovering a disk or partition image, it's recommended to do so from the ATI bootable Rescue Media. As the Rescue Media is based on Linux, disks will enumerate differently so that E: in Windows may not be E: in the Rescue Media. That's why you need to be able to identify each partition by name, not by letter.

Perhaps seeing a screen capture of your computers disks might help to determine why?

As you look at the sequence of partition placement as listed in Disk Management, is the partition placement the same sequence has it has always been?

Hi Tuttle,

Thanks for replying.
Yes, I am sure :-)

Off course I labeled them with the proper names, as they appreared in Windows.
E.g. C-DISK-SYS for C-drive, D-DISK-DATA for D-drive etc.

I know the Rescue CD is based on Linux, and I see the drive-letters reversed there as well.
When I use Acronis Disk Director though (also from a CDROM) I see the drives in the good order, so the partitions are labeled according to the appearance there.

I remember having this once more, but that was a few years ago, with Windows 7 (no SP1). After playing some time with the system, I wanted to restore it, and -voila- there it was.
I am sure though that -when I make a backup now, and restore it - it would be good. But as I keep the earlier backups for going back to very basic configurations of my system, it would be nice that this "problem" could be solved.

Cheers

Kees

Hi GroverH,

Thank you for answering.
Well, yes, the sequence is the same.
I can add a screen cap later. Also look at my answer to Tuttle, please.

Cheers

Kees

Kees,
You wrote "When I restore it, the drives D and E are reversed."

Would you clarify a little more. Are you saying only the drive letters were reversed,
or are you saying that the placement of the partitions also changed?
for example so that partition 2 become partition 3 after the restore?

If you use the Diskpart command, how are the partitions listed?
http://forum.acronis.com/system/files/resize/mvp/user285/misc/show-disk…

Assuming that your response is that only the drive letters are being changed.

Here is one option try.

In Windows disk management, remove the drive letter from both D and E.
Reboot with only drive C assigned.

After reboot, using Windows Disk Management

Assign drive letter D to D-DISK-DATA
assign drive e to the other partition.
reboot to check that the change continues to hold.

Create a new backup task and start a new set of backups point to a new empty storage folder. Cease to use the old backup task.

Question: Are you using partition mode or disk mode for your backups? My recommendation is disk mode.

Hi Grover,

I did all that what you described, but to no avail.
Now, however, I think I have the solution:
I first backup the D and E disks.
The within Windows Disk Management, I removed these partitions.
Rebooted, re-constructed the partitions, and restored the D and E disks.
Then restored the C-partition to the wanted image and....voila.

So no real solution or explanation, but a good work-around.
Using partition mode. That's the quickest way.
Restoring MBR/Track 0 yes or no, makes no difference in this solution.

The partitions in DISKPART are neatly ordered: 1,2 and 3 being the C,D and E disk.

Thanks for the efforts. Always ready to look into some possibilities if you are interested in more details.

Cheers,

Kees