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How to Safely Rename duplicate SYSTEM and RECOVERY Partitions

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Hi,

    One thing that has REALLY bothered me about various ATIH releases over the past 6 years, is that it is very difficult to checkmark the Partitions I need to be saved in a FULL backup. I have two drives in the PC, and other than the main OS partition, all the rest are also named System, or Unidentified, or Recovery.

   With two drives online, these are duplicated, and dififcult to sort out which SYSTEM or RECOVERY partition belongs to which storage device. Acronis should have fixed this confusion a long time ago, by grouping the identically named partitions under their common device.

   Since that can't be fixed for exisiting ATIH 2014, is it possible to use Windows commands for example, to rename each Recovery partition to something like HD-RECOVERY and SSD-RECOVERY? Similarly, by unplugging one storage device to separate out the confusing mess of partition names, can I rename a partition named SYSTEM to "SYS-SSD-Win-10" and another from System to "SYS-HD-Win-8-OLD", etc.

Microsoft's  Updates from Win-7 to Win-8, then update again to Win-10 has left behind two or more old OS backups, each one called SYSTEM. In doing a difficult Win-8  ATIH recovery and subsequent use of Windows internal commands, the Recovery partition and the the old Win-7 partition became EFI-types, and now show up in the PC boot sequence - each one except the true Winodows partiton, hangs in the boot up. 

What an ATIH mess.

If I could "safely" rename these various System partitions, then it would solve BOTH problems:

(1) I can knowledgably checkmark the correct partitons for a single drive to be FULLY backed up, and

(2) I might be able to remove the boot record from the non-OS partitions - if this is allowed so they don't needlessly stop the booting process..

Previously, on the original "clean working" system, there was just the front end EFI tagged partition - Now I have two or three EFI's on the same drive. I need to make the non-OS partitions non-EFI visible ... without reformatting these partitions in order to rename them or remove their boot record.

My LARGEST fear is that by using a utility like DISKPART, or some other Win-internal reserved command, I may end up renaming the assortment of SYSTEM or EFI partitons, and the drive becomes totally unbootable.

Thanks,

Joe

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Joe,

Some of your concerns have been addressed in later versions of ATIH, i.e. in ATIH 2016 I am shown all my disk(s) and partitions as in the attached screen shot, where these are ordered according to the parent disk.  There is also an option at the bottom left of the panel which switches between Full partition list & Short partition list where the full list includes all hidden / system partition that can be excluded from the view in the short list.

I would not recommend trying to rename the hidden system partitions on your computer, in some cases these are the descriptions of the partition type rather the name.

Please see: Understanding Disk Partitions which gives much more information about the different partitions.

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