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Restore: Source and Destination drive letters not the same

I am testing Backupper to restore from an image in case of total HD failure, and have made a boot USB drive and an image on an external hard drive.  The image has Disk0 is OSDisk(C:) with a small Recovery Volume also on Disk0.  I am able to boot my Win7 laptop fine on the USB drive , select Restore and use Path to navigate to my image on external hard drive G:.  
-Under Backup Point, I highlight my Full Backup and hit Next
-Under Operation Summary it shows two source and two destination Partitions:

Source                      Destination
C:OSDisk      -->       E: OSDisk
*:Recovery     -->      C:Recovery

So why Backupper trying to put the C:OSDisk onto the E:drive, which does not even exist?!  Is there a problem with the Recovery part of Disk 0?  If so, what do I do to ensure the C:OSDisk is restored to the C: drive?

Comments

  • Did you restore and boot from the HDD? Drive letters in bootable media can be different than when booted from HDD.
  • I booted from a USB thumbdrive which was given the letter F:
    My Backup image was on external HD with the letter G:
    What I am trying to understand is why Backupper shows the non-existent E: drive as destination for the restored image and not C:  
    If I went ahead with the restore as shown, what would happen to my image--would it actually get put on the C: drive or would the C:drive be renamed to E: ?  Or would it just fail altogether because there is no E: dirve?
  • edited September 2018
    If you are just testing, what's the problem with just going ahead with the restore and seeing what you get? If it's not C: then you can go from there. Just make sure when you boot from the restored disk, that the original is not connected. You don't want to confuse the system with 2 boot options. I would probably go a little further and not have any other drive connected but the restored test drive just to eliminate any possible conflicts.
  • I don't want to go ahead with the Restore at this point because right now there is nothing wrong with my laptop and I don't want to mess it up by overwriting my system files incorrectly and ending up with a totally corrupted computer.  I have never used Backupper before and just want to understand it before I REALLY need to use it to restore an image.  I am not sure what you mean by "restored test drive" as there is only one C: drive in the computer.  What other drive would I restore to?  There is no E: drive in the system at all, so that is why I am confused Backupper is trying to restore the image to the  non-existent E: drive.  
  • NO NO NO. I did not suggest overwriting your drive. If you test a restore you want to do it to a spare drive. Using a laptop does make that difficult and I have no idea how easy it would be to replace your drive with a spare to do the test. I can tell you in the multiple tests I've done and actual restores to a new drive (in lieu of cloning) it has always worked for me.
  • If you click Clone-->Disk Clone, you will see what the E:drive is.
  • Thanks all, especially Flyer, for your patience in helping me to understand the drive letters during a Restore.  This  has been a real learning experience for me :-) 
    Flyer, you are right, I do not have the skills or spare drive to swap out the internal C:drive on my laptop and I see I cannot do a Test Restore to an external USB HD so I will have to trust that the Image will work should I ever actually need it. If not, I have my data files backed up in the cloud so not total disaster--just the nuisance of rebuilding the system and software install.
    On the Drive letters, this time I booted up using my Backupper boot thumbdrive and *wrote down* what drives were mapped where (I had it wrong before):
    Recovery C:
    Backupper D :
    OSDisk E:
    CDdrive F:
    Image G:
    Boot X:
    Here is my understanding so far.  So as Johnnygoboy said, the Boot Media assigned different drive letters.  I have always assumed the C drive was the C drive, never changed and this led to my confusion.  So the Restore showing a restore to the E drive is the correct location in that the Boot Media is calling the OSDisk the E drive, instead of the C drive.  And when I looked at Clone Disk as Admin suggested I see that Disk0 is comprised of 2 parts:  E:OSDisk and C:Recovery.
    Okay, so that clears up the E disk thing--I see the Boot Media has assigned that letter to my Boot Volume.

    Suppose down the road either my OS gets corrupted or HD crashes and I need a new one.  I boot up with the thumbdrive Boot Media, select Restore and navigate to my Image.  If for whatever reason, Backupper does restore to Disk0 as E:OSDisk and C:Recovery, does Windows know to boot from E: instead of C, since that is where all the boot files are?  Later, can I just go in and change E: to C: using Disk Management  since C is hardwired into my brain as the boot drive?    If that is possible, then I have my answers.
  • edited September 2018
    Normally if no drive letters are assigned before, they are assigned at first boot and the OS partition will become C drive.
    If they are wrong for some reason (for example if you clone the OS partition to another partition on the same disk and then boot from the clone), you could also delete all keys (assignments) in the registry and boot again.
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
    They will be assigned again at boot time.

    Since the letter assignments are stored in the registry (which is in the backup), they can never be changed or assigned by Aomei from the bootable media.
    The registry records something like Disk ID + Partition ID = letter X
    When restored on the same disk as where the backup is made from, the same letters are used because they are read from the registry at boot time.
    When restored on another disk, which has another Disk ID so the registry does not hold usefull information about drive letters, they are assigned at boot time and the OS partition becomes C

  • edited October 2018
    By the way. If you do a disk (or system) restore you better do that on a clean (empty) disk. You didn't,  that is why you got the confusion of the letters. In the help documents you see a screen of a restore operation to an empty disk. In the summary there is only mentioned Source disk to Destinations disk, no letters. Because letters are assigned after the restore at first boot.
    You can clean a disk wth diskpart.exe



    .
  • Thanks JohnnyboyGo for all the good information.  Yes, I think part of my misunderstanding is that I do not have an empty drive to restore to, since I am just testing things out before I have a problem.  So if I have a full HD crash and need to replace the HD, there should be no problem to Restore because of course the new HD is empty.  In the case where I believe the HD to be okay, but only have a corrupt OS,  I have a question about cleaning the HD with  diskpart.exe before a restore.  Is diskpart.exe available on the Boot Media I make with Backupper?  So presumably if my C drive is corrupt, I could boot up with the Boot Media, clean the C drive with diskpart.exe, then Restore from the Image on the external hard drive?  Does that sound right?
  • edited October 2018
    Yes, you are right. In the Utilities menu of the bootable media, you can go to Windows Shell (DOS) and type in Diskpart.
    Then in Diskpart issue these commands:
    list disk
    select disk #  (the internal disk that should be cleaned, often number 0)
    clean
    convert gpt (only if you are on an UEFI machine and you do a System Restore. A Disk restore can do that for you autom.)
    exit
    exit

    I now see that you did a system backup/restore and not a disk backup/restore. Then you do see letters if the destination disk is not cleaned. Even if the disk is clean and you restore, then the USB bootable Aomei assigns temporarily a letter to the partitions, but that is only for use in the bootable media. As soon as you boot from the HDD/SSD all will be fine and the OS will be on C.
    .
    Mind that Clean wipes the complete disk. So if you have other partitions (data) on it, they should be backuped first!

    This is what I see when doing a system restore on a Clean disk:
     



  • JohnnyboyGo, yes during my test I did do a System Backup.  I have since read up on the  System Backup versus a Disk Backup on the AOMEI website and see now I want the Disk backup.   My goal is to have a "snapshot" of my entire computer so I can restore to that in case of disaster with all the OS and software installed, and data files at that point (I have data file cloud backup for the files created after the Disk Backup image) So  I have corrected that and started doing Disk Backups\ images for my computers.  Once again, thanks for all your help.  I hope to never need any of these backups, but it is best to be prepared and I feel now I have a much better understanding of the Backupper software.
  • edited December 2023
    I just did clone disk a couple of days ago from Windows environment and at the end of the process Windows did assign letter E to my new destination result partition. After removing system C disk and put destination one alone in the pc, it failed to boot correctly. From diskpart.exe I could see the same situation that source and destination disks were not done (cloned) identical. I believe that Backupper should be checked about this issue. I ended up using different software to finish disk cloning.

    Cheers
  • edited December 2023
    Janotka, Windows drive letters are fluid, they can change anytime. It does not have an affect on them. That is normal.
    I understand you cloned a disk, but the target disk does not boot. Please, before you clone, always confirm the partition table type is the same of the source and target disk. If your source disk is MBR, your target must be MBR. If your source is GPT, your target must be GPT. If the partition table type does not match, you must convert the target disk partition table before clone.
    If you must convert the target disk partition table type, you may use Partition Assistant, or Diskpart.
    Caution, cleaning and converting the partition table type with Diskpart will erase the disk.
    Cmd > Diskpart > lis dis > sel dis # > cle > con GPT
    or
    Cmd > Diskpart > lis dis > sel dis # > cle > con MBR
    If this does not solve your issue, please clone the disk again using PA with Exact-Sector-By-Sector method. While BU also has this setting, BU will not clone the partiton table, only PA will with the setting on.
    It doesn't matter where your source and target disks are, either one can be inside or outside of PC, the PA clone with the setting will work.
    If this still does not work, please create a new separate forum post, and include screenshots, thank you.
  • If you can become comfortable with accessing the HD or SSD that is in your laptop, removing it and replacing it with a new one, then there is an alternative to the Restore process.
    Just buy a new HD or SDD that is identical to the one currently in your laptop and clone this new disc from your existing one using a readily obtainable USB to SATA connector lead to connect the new disc to your laptop for the cloning. Then repeat this cloning every month or so, so it is kept up to date with the status of your laptop.
    Then, if your laptop's HD fails to boot you just swap it for the cloned drive and you're immediately up and running again!
    If this failure occurs just before the month's re-cloning, then just restore that month's files from the cloud where you say you back them up.
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