I just don't get this as it makes zero sense to me. Let's start with my drive set up.

2 500GB M.2 SSD drives for system drive (C:\) and clone backup.
1 6 TB spin drive for movies.
1 4 TB spin drive for a second movie drive.
1 240 GB SATA SSD for video conversions.
1 2 TB drive partitioned to 2 1 TB partitions to split for data and internal system image backups.

I use Acronis and Disk Wizard (free Acronis) boot media to do my clone and image backups and all works well. I do my backups strictly manually through the boot media with neither Acronis or Disk Wizard actually installed on my system.

I also like to use Disk Management to remove the drive letters from, both, my clone destination drive and image partition. Here is what I don't understand. I like to remove the drive letters as they can then not be seen by Windows. While some bad stuff could possibly still infect this drive and partition it is less likely.

I'm sure that we will all agree that removing the drive/partition letter will make Windows not see them but in a recovery boot situation it should mean nothing as removing the drive letter is strictly a Windows thing. Strangely this is not quite the actual case...

As far as using the Acronis or Disk Wizard recovery media to do a clone there is no issue and the destination drive for the clone is fully seen even though invisible in Windows. This seems proper and what I want.

The problem is that, if I remove the drive letter for the image destination in Windows, it becomes unavailable through the boot media. This makes zero sense to me as removing the drive/partition letter in Windows should have no impact as to the boot media. If I restore the drive letter in Windows the partition is then available for image backups.

Anyone have any clue as to what is going on?

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Sorry, Jay, I also have no clue.
Bill

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The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution. -- Emerson

I'm going to speculate that removing the drive letter through Windows alters the MBR on the drive and that the space on the drive is seen by the boot media as unpartitioned space. Unpartitioned space is what a clone copy wants as a destination, but an image copy is a file which needs a formatted destination. This is only speculation on my part.

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stephen boots
Microsoft MVP 2004 - 2020
"Life's always an adventure with computers!"

Thanks. No actual issue involved, just curious.

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Hey Steve, after thinking about what you said, I don't think that it is the case. Of course this is in no way conclusive but there is one aspect between the clone and image drives that makes me wonder as to your thoughts. When I do a clone backup with the clone destination drive letter removed I still get a caution that the destination contains an operating system so the recovery media seems to be able to read the drive. Of course the drive polling method could be different between a clone and image backup.

I DID have a thought that the way my motherboard handles SATA connections might be a factor. I guess that I need to dig back through the SATA part of my BIOS. While I have no reason to do this the mother board/BIOS allows hot swapping of SATA drives. In fact I use a third party software called 'USB Safely Remove' and it sees all non system drives as USB drives and they can be selectively turned off.
https://safelyremove.com/index.htm

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Many of the newer BIOS's have a version of the Intel Rapid Storage Software imbedded in them, that may be seeing the drives. I know recently when playing with new drivers for my controller it said that it had to restart in safe mode to update the driver, what it didn't say that it was also making a change to the BIOS which took me a while to figure out what it had done.

Thanks David.

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