Windows 10: Drive letters/numbers keep changing

I'm running Win 10 Pro.

I have two hard drives in my PC, both are exactly the same - I use Acronis TrueImage to regularly clone one drive to another as a backup. I've done this for a long time on my old PC running Win 7 64-Bit but have recently bought another PC (spec'd by myself) that's running Win 10 Pro.

I should say that this doesn't affect the booting of the PC, it always boots the correct drive with the most current data, it's just that if I go into Disk Management the PC sometimes states that drive 0 has letter D assigned to it and drive 1 has letter C assigned.

What SHOULD be the case is that drive 0 is always C and drive 1 is always D. The only way that I can revert it to this order is by messing around in the BIOS and often swapping the SATA cables around.

I should re-stress that the PC still always boots to the correct drive with the most recent data (I can tell by the contents), it's just the numbering/letters that get swapped around.

I suspect that Windows updates (any updates) and subsequent reboots are causing the problem.

How can how set things so that drive 0 is always C and drive 1 is always D?

Part of the reason that I want to do this is because when I clone the drives I like to clone low to high, so drive 0 overwrites drive 1 - with the swapped letters/numbers I may one day, by accident, clone OLD data over NEW data .........

My PC has an ASUS Prime B350-Plus motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB video card, 2 x 2TB hard drives, 8GBytes RAM, DVD/Blu-ray drive

:)

 

Problem with the "Reserved Partition"; Error: "We can't upgrade the system reserved partition."

Greg,

After a number of searches, a few users thought the Dell Backup program caused the drive letters for ESP and WinRE to appear in File Explorer. I deleted the program and the drive letters for ESP and WinRe disappeared in Explorer. Everything in Explorer looks
normal now.

To get Win10 to install I deleted a file from ESP as you suggested. Then there was a new WinRE in Win10. I think those changes caused Dell Backup to assign the drive letters to those changed partitions.

Maybe that will help someone else although I think my problem was rather unique.

As always, thanks for your help.

 

Location of devices

Hi Hilary. I'm Greg, a volunteer installation specialist and 8 year Windows MVP, here to help you.

If it's a drive and you want to change it's letter, right click Start to open Disk Management, right click on the Drive to Change Letter.

If any other removable devices are in preceding letters, you can move them to a higher letter so that the preferred Device can be changed to the desired letter. Just don't try to change a System Drive or C letter.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask back any questions and let us know how it goes. I will keep working with you until it's resolved.

 

The problem is when windows sees a new drive it writes a signature to it so it know what it is if you clone a drive and both are in at the same time windows can get confussedas it sees the same signature for both drives. The o/s doesnt always boot disk 0 it boot the one with an active parition.

Its simpler to make iamges to the second drive and with compression you can get a lot of images on a drive so you can role back if you image a drive then find its infected you have both infected with images you can go back to an earlier image

 

Windows always labels any drive/partition you run them from as C:, you can't have 2 disks/partitions with same letter in one windows session.

 

Thanks for the replies. The thing is, I didn't have this problem with Windows 7. So what in Windows 10 doing that is different?

 

Nothing is different in that regard with disks/partitions and their letters. It's all same since first DOS.

 

Thanks, but why then do I have this issue under Win 10 and not Win 7 ? *Smile

 

You have two identical disks and it's up to BIOS to choose which one to boot from. Can we have computer description and picture of your Disk management ? Your W7 might have been installed in legacy BIOS mode and W10 as UEFI, that could explain the difference in BOOT order.

 

My PC has an ASUS Prime B350-Plus motherboard, AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB video card, 2 x 2TB hard drives, 8GBytes RAM, DVD/Blu-ray drive

Here's a screenshot of the Disk Management program:

 

You can paste the picture in your post. Stil waiting for Pfotobucket to load it.

 

Why are you cloning anyway?

This is a very inefficient use of disk space and decidedly unflexible.

It makes far more sense to create image backups, and then you can have backups at different stages so you can revert to an earlier version if unexpected issues arise.

Not only that, it is a good idea to periodically backup images to an external drive. It has been known for a pc failure to fry both disks, and also for hackers to "ransom" online drives.


Making a single clone to an internal drive does not give you adequate data backup integrity.

 

I'm still waiting for picture to load.

 

Edited post and pasted image into it. *Smile

 

You make some good points, I prefer to clone as if one drive fails I can simply boot from the clone and continue to use the PC. Well, that's the theory anyway.