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drivecleanser - change in drive letters

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(winXP home)

I have a HDD hot-swap tray in my tower, and 3 drives that I can swap in and out, to backup and mirror (clone) my 3 internal drives. All these internal drives are partitioned.

This was my brilliant back-up idea I had a few years ago. I didn't like it.....because if I put the cloned drive back in the hot/swap tray , my puter would recognize it as an additional drive, see all it's partitions, and change all the drive letters on my permanent drives to accommodate it. Things would get lost....the drive mapping of my applications would get screwed up.

Now, I just use TI 2011 on an external USB drive. Fine.

But I want to "wipe" these 3 external drives, and use them for other purposes.
The problem with even attaching these drives to my system to reformat them (or use "drivecleanser" to wipe them).....is my system "sees" the drives, and the partitions, and changes all my drive letters again !!

HOW DO I.....format or wipe these external drives, without my system "seeing" them and their partitions and changing all my drive letters ?
(One of these extra drives has XP OS on it)

If I get an external enclosure with USB or Firewire connection, will my puter still see these as "drives" ?? ...and still change all my other drive letters ?

thanks....

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Randy:

Shut down your PC, attach the drive or drives, and then boot your PC from the Acronis True Image 2011 recovery CD. Use the "Drive Cleanser" on the tools menu to wipe the drive(s). There's no need to do a secure deletion; you only need to delete the first part of the disk containing the partition table. You can also use the "Add New Disk" feature to prepare the disk for recognition by Windows.

The key is to do this from the recovery CD when Windows is not running. If Windows isn't running it can't assign or change drive letters. On first boot, Windows may try to change some drive letters but you can change them back and the new letters will be remembered permanently.

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