Backup Tied to Another Drive ?
I've been using True Image for a few years now and have successfully used the software to restore an entire drive to specific images more than a few times.
I was doing another test of my backups and noticed out of the blue that my C: drive backup is tied to another drive for some reason. Is there any way to remove this drive as being necessary to the backup? Pretty sure the D: drive was a system drive at one point but has been reallocated to a backup roll for a few years now.
Do I need to move all the files I want on that drive to a new location, and format D: then move them back to remove this link in True Image ? D: is not the drive that runs the system or holds Win 10 OS, or the boot manager. Really not sure why this drive is being tied to my backup images and would like it to be removed, since it is not needed. Just not sure how to go about it correctly.


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The main drive being backed up is an internal SSD, Mushkin Enhanced Reactor 1TB SATA. D: drive is an internal WD 5TB HDD. Not sure why the HDD would be necessary to backup the SSD ?
My concern is What happens to my restore image if there is no secondary drive named D: in the PC while restoring ? Is it possible to remove the D: drive dependency from being backed up ? It's non critical and only serves as storage. There are portable apps installed on D: that have shortcuts on the C: drive desktop. Maybe removing that link would remove the backup dependency ?
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When you use the recovery media, the drive letter assignments do not necessarily correspond to those on the system being backed. When I use the MVP PE Builder it assigns drive letters to hidden partitions such as the recovery partition or the UEFI partition - this allows you to run diagnostics on the hidden partitions. When you restore the full disk, and boot it up those partitions will not be assigned letters by the OS. Thus your second HDD which is supposed to be drive D will appear as drive D.
Ian
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Ted, the most likely reason for having the EFI system partition on a different drive is that this is because that drive was originally the main OS boot drive before you moved the OS to run on your new SSD drive.
See some of the results found by doing a Google search 'How to move EFI partition?' where this issue has been raised many times.
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IanL-S wrote:When you use the recovery media, the drive letter assignments do not necessarily correspond to those on the system being backed. When I use the MVP PE Builder it assigns drive letters to hidden partitions such as the recovery partition or the UEFI partition - this allows you to run diagnostics on the hidden partitions. When you restore the full disk, and boot it up those partitions will not be assigned letters by the OS. Thus your second HDD which is supposed to be drive D will appear as drive D.
Ian
This is the answer.
Drive letter assignments in rescue media can be different because it is a new OS booted temporarily into memory. This can change drive letters based on how fast each drive and partition responds at boot, since the OS will drive the next available volume letter in order.
It is NOT tied to the way your main OS lists the drive letters and those will be reflected normally when you boot back into your main Windows OS again since those settings are not temporary and actually saved in the Windows OS configuration.
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This is my dilemma in understanding how to remove this link. I’m not even sure why it’s there.
I rebuilt this PC this week in a new case and new BluRay drive, those were the only changes. I booted up C drive first, by itself to make sure everything worked properly. I then connected the other drives in the order I wanted them to be assigned. The PC booted fine without D drive even attached to the system. So why is this link even there ?
Looking in Disk Management, there isn’t even an EFI partition on Drive D.
But If I go to Windows Backup, the same dependency on D drive is there.
I do have portable apps and installed apps on D drive. Could that be causing the dependency issue ?
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Ted, the first check I would suggest is to disconnect or remove all disk drives except your Windows boot drive and verify that you can still boot correctly into Windows?
If all is still OK, then the EFI partition is left over from a prior OS install and can be deleted using a partition manager tool or similar.
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Steve Smith wrote:Ted, the first check I would suggest is to disconnect or remove all disk drives except your Windows boot drive and verify that you can still boot correctly into Windows?
If all is still OK, then the EFI partition is left over from a prior OS install and can be deleted using a partition manager tool or similar.
What's confusing me is that C drive booted up just fine by itself on the rebuild. There is no EFI partition on D, as shown in Disk Management. But even using Windows Backup, it shows a System dependency on D drive, as shown in the pictures I posted above. D drive only has one partition.
Any recommendations on a good partition manager tool that may help me see if there is a hidden system partition on D drive ?
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Download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software
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Ted Strassburg wrote:What's confusing me is that C drive booted up just fine by itself on the rebuild. There is no EFI partition on D, as shown in Disk Management. But even using Windows Backup, it shows a System dependency on D drive, as shown in the pictures I posted above. D drive only has one partition.
The screenshot of disk management shows that the second drive (the boot drive) has 3 partitions, drive C (OS) and two hidden partitions, the first would be the recovery partition and the second is labeled UEFI. That is what I would expect to see on a HDD that contains OS. It also shows that drive D is now what you would expect rather than the drive letter that would have been assigned when using the recovery media.
Ian
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IanL-S wrote:Ted Strassburg wrote:What's confusing me is that C drive booted up just fine by itself on the rebuild. There is no EFI partition on D, as shown in Disk Management. But even using Windows Backup, it shows a System dependency on D drive, as shown in the pictures I posted above. D drive only has one partition.The screenshot of disk management shows that the second drive (the boot drive) has 3 partitions, drive C (OS) and two hidden partitions, the first would be the recovery partition and the second is labeled UEFI. That is what I would expect to see on a HDD that contains OS. It also shows that drive D is now what you would expect rather than the drive letter that would have been assigned when using the recovery media.
Ian
The OS drive is an SSD drive. Drive D is a physical HDD.
I guess since the machine booted up fine with just the SSD attached, there really isn't an issue. Just troubles me that even Windows wants to include system files from D: in order to perform a backup on C. Maybe I'll try disconnecting all drives and performing a True Image backup and see what the outcome is.
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