How do I achieve a clone or a system restore without changing the volume letters onto a new disk
Hi I’m new here and have a problem;
I have tried several options on but cannot achieve a bootable clone of my
original new hard drive. It is loaded with the fresh install of windows and all
my programs and data. I also own Dynamic disk manager and after cloning or
restoring a system backup the C: on the clone or restored disk changes to the
nearest letter when viewed in the disk manager or under windows disk
management. The drive letter on the operating system cannot be changed
hence my computer won’t recognise the disk as a bootable disk when plugged in
as a standalone drive. I assume once booted I can easily change the
drive letter on my data storage! Please could I ask is there a method of
doing this outside the windows environment and if so how?
Also for future reference I
would like to dual boot and I have been studying my BIOS for boot sequence
(Asus UFIE) but am I able to have both disks connected and clone
my data or operating system as data or programs are added in the future,
in the same computer seeing two C: drives to swop between or two
S: data storage volumes? I seem to have got thoroughly
confused as I find the tutorials grammar and sentence structures hard to
understand.
Many Thanks in anticipation
of your replies.
Comments
John,
Windows will automatically asign a drive letter to the new drive once it's read a partition (actually a new drive letter per mappable partition). If you want to clone your C: drive without this happening, you're much better off building a bootable CD or USB drive, booting from it then cloning the drive from that point. We can provide more detailed instructions if you need.
As for the dual booting some motherboards will allow you to choose which drive you want to boot from and then reorder the drive numbers based on which is the boot drive. Some do not. This is important because Windows assigns drive letters based on the order that it reads partitions. Swapping between drives isn't always going to work that way, and it will be system dependent.
Another way to dual boot without relying on whether or not your board supports the previous method is to use chain loading in the Windows boot loader or installing a third party boot loader like GRUB that will let you add multiple OSes to the boot menu. Granted this can be complicated and is better pursued on a forum specifically for that kind of information.
Daryl
I think you misunderstand what drive letters are.
Not clear what you are trying to do,or what you have done, or which os you are using.If you are trying to boot windows via usb, it may require some fiddling about.
If that is not what you mean, then it is likely the result of disk signature collision ( that would only be the case if you did a literal clone).
If the latter, you can correct the bcd entry the current (live) bcd store using bcdboot command.
bcdboot <non booting drive letter:>\Windows
e.g. bcdboot d:\windows
If you want to correct the bcd store on the "standalone" drive:
bcdboot d:\windows /s d:
Thanks Daryl for the reply, i
have produced a bootable CD from AOMEI Backupper utilities and booted into
windows using the disk then went into backupper and set up both a disk
clone and restore to my new disk. You are able to preview the drives
before committing.
The C drive had already at
this point been labeled K: and my S drive T and all the small windows
volumes which have no drive letters only * assigned to them were all labelled
as well. I want an accurate clone of my disk so that the UEFI Bios can
accurately carry out the fast boot Asus utilities allow on the disk as well as
windows accurately finding the correct boot path.
I have already worked out
that entering the BIOS allows me to choose the boot disk very easily that is no
problem, all I want is a proper mirror image of my original disk on my
second disk as a backup. That’s what I thought Cloning was all about but
because the word computer comes into it that is just gobbledygook. Sorry for
the rant I have wasted over a week first of all reading forum after forum and
deciding on Backupper as my best bet to rely on doing the job and still I
have not achieved a result.
When reading the tutorials it
all sounds so easy to be able to keep a second disk up to date free of problems
and viruses but the reality of it is, it is nowhere near the mark. I
am truly fed up of in the past reformatting windows and reloading my programs
and data and really want to find a solution to this problem as that seems to
have burnt up years of my life. I seem so close at the moment I just need a
little more technical help to achieve that please. Do you have any advice I can
follow to achieve that possibility Please.
Also to occasionaly have the ablity to transfer data or my C: volume as I add the odd programs to my computer without this whole scenario of relabeling every volume. I really would appreciate your advice.
John K
Sorry, I should have said it is a brand new Asus Computer and I am running windows 8.1. The disk is a 2Tb converted to GPT disk that I am trying to clone, copy or restore partitions to. All I want is a clone of every thing I have on a bootable disk that mirrors the original 2Tb disk with all my programs and data on.
John K
Here is a picture of my Asus Windows 8.1 Drive volumes which I would expect to see the cloned disk mirroring
John K
OK Here is a summary of where I am at right now. I really appreciate any help I can get here as having sent an email to [email protected] I have had no reply and wonder if they are at all interested in any support of any kindwhatsoever to their paid up customers.
After extensive reading of the tutorials I decided the best route to achieve what I require was to restore the disk backup to my second drive. All the backups I have made are held on an external USB3 drive, so I have disconnected my master drive in the computer and connected my virgin 2Tb drive as a standalone drive. Having made a Backupper Boot CD then booted up the computer and invoked Backupper to restore the backup of my master drive onto my virgin 2Tb drive (so hopefully no confusion over volume lettering) the restore went perfectly. According to the tutorial I should now have a bootable disk!!!!
No way is it bootable. So I resorted to trying to restore the system backups I hold on the external drive but when restore asks me which volume I should restore I can clearly see that the restored drive now has drive letters assigned to vital boot sector volumes which on my master disk have no drive letters. Amazingly the C: volume OS and my S: volume Data Storage have remained the same but no wonder the disk cannot boot!
I thought no problem I have disk partition manger pro all paid up, all I have to do is produce a bootable partition manager CD; boot up with that and go and remove the drive letters. I have found out to my expense that the partition manager boot CD is not recognised in the boot utility of my UEFI Bios where as the boot disk of Backupper is. Partition manager offers an alternative to the CD a bootable USB drive so I have a Kingston Datatraveller USB3 stick 64Gb and the original windows installation disk, so after 7 hrs of producing this; that’s how long it took, guess what neither does that boot the computer. However after extensive research of Microsoft’s site the USB stick has to be a special Windows-to-Go supported stick from Kingston costing a small fortune and is the only one that will work with Windows-to-Go, sadly no mention of this is made in the tutorial.
So I am still stuck with 2 pieces of software that do not do what they purport to do and no support from AOMEI. I wonder how hard it will be to ask for a refund.
All I want at the end of the day is to produce a replica of my master disk as a backup that I can swap to in times of trouble, as windows will inevitably either slow down or pack up at some time, that’s guaranteed. Surely you guys may now get the picture of what I require and I’m sure you must have some technical knowledgeof the product and its pitfalls. I have gone so far with this and wasted over a week trying to achieve this. I don’t want to give up at the last hurdle, I really, really appeal to you for some help Please.
John K
P.S. a problem I foresee is how will I get into my slave disk to wipe the drive if I have to? I do not want to mount both drives in the computer together and mess up my master disk with the same drive letters on both C: volumes and S: volumes causing confusion and wrecking my master disk?
Sorry for the long explanation and frustration.