Choosing Drives in Windows 7 System Image
Hi everyone, I'd like to know if there is anyway to force how windows 7 chooses the drives that are used to create a system image. For some reason my D: drive is now being selected and there is no OS installed on this drive, just some user folders along with a lot of data. Yet for some reason the system image utility wants to include this entire drive in the backup. How can I prevent this drive from being selected, the option is greyed out when running the backup utility.
October 18th, 2009 12:32pm

I would highly recommend investing in an external hard drive and store the image on it. Otherwise,if your hard drive were to fail, the image would not be accessable for a recovery. Carey Frisch
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October 18th, 2009 2:54pm

I would highly recommend investing in an external hard drive and store the image on it. Otherwise,if your hard drive were to fail, the image would not be accessable for a recovery. Carey Frisch Could you please re-read my question. I am trying to create a system image and for some reason my data drive is being selected by windows as part of the system image. This has nothing to do with where I want to store the system image. To answer your question, I do have an external drive and also have other drives setup in RAID 1 for backup and storage purposes.
October 18th, 2009 5:42pm

I've never used Windows Backup, always preferred Acronis True Image, but I just went through the setup for it and it allowed me to select what I wanted to backup. Did you do this the first time you used it, but didn't select Custom, then perhaps something is now on the D: drive that backup thinks is required for your system to boot and run. You could try turning off System Restore for the D: drive, see if that makes a difference. Really no point in having it monitor anything other than your boot drive anyway.
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October 18th, 2009 7:28pm

He's talking about creating a system image, not the incremental backup pictured above. The reason it selects your data drive is there may be system boot files on it that are requiered for windows to start or run properly. Look for files named "bootmgr' or a folder named "boot". If these are present on your data drive it will be permanently selected.
October 20th, 2009 1:57pm

The check box for Include a System Image of drives: System Reserved, D370_C (C:) is checked. Would that not create a system image?
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October 20th, 2009 6:10pm

Yes it would but there is no selection of which drive to backup in the incremental backup page. If selecting from the image backup dialoge there is a choice of which drives to include and as you can see two of them are grey. One of them is the OS partition and the other - XP has the boot files and is marked asthe active partition.
October 21st, 2009 2:53am

I have exactly the same issue. I've just installed W7 Pro and when I want to create a system disk image, both C: and D: are checked and greyed out (cannot uncheck D:) I suppose this happens because I've included folders on D: in Librairies for different users on the PC. But I'm not interested to backup D:\ as the disk image will take 280Gb :( I'm juts looking for a way to make a "ghost" of the OS so I can quickly reinstall Windows in case of big crash. Too bad, MS utility doesn't have this option. And btw the system repair disk is not the same stuff at all.
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November 1st, 2009 3:30am

Hi DaveWolf/Chouf Can you please drop me a mail @ suhasrao-nospam@microsoft.com(remove the -nospam before sending the mail) .We can just check directly using some tools etc , on your machine as to what is causing the other Drive to get selected for backup.I will update this post with the results of the investigation once we are done.Also Chouf , the reason why the D: is included is NOT beacuase of the libraries , it is probably due to some service or something that has been installed on the drive.Thanks,Suhas Rao [MSFT]
November 5th, 2009 7:12am

DaveWolf, I want you to paste this into your search box "devmgmt.msc". Now click on disk managment and tell me whichpartitionis marked as active. Also while your at it tell me which partition has the folder "boot" and the file "bootmgr".Tip: if you unmark the previous answer you may get more replies here.
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November 5th, 2009 9:24am

Me too.... I had D: in libraries and in offline files. Windows Media Player made me do that. Ah, well, now I have removed D: from libraries and removed it from offline files as well. System image and backup still wants to usebothD: not C: for sysimages.boot dir and bootmgr is on C:/dnm
November 9th, 2009 4:03pm

I had the same problem. It's not the libraries however. At least in my case it was a program which was installed on D:\ which was running some services so Windows though it was important. Check what you have installed on D:\ and try to uninstall it.
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November 13th, 2009 1:31pm

I have the same problem. C (my Win7 OS on an SATA drive) and D (which is an external USB drive) selected and greyed out. What is on my D drive is folders $AVG, 6c740d8e8ca913390ac4b573b3 and f1a507d3a785532ba830, none of which I put there. All other folders and files on the D drive are ones I put there. Waiting for the MSFT to get back with us. thorne My hard drives: Device0 - IDE and disabled in Device Manager Device1 - IDE Device2 - SATA Device3 - SATA Device4 - SATA (windows 7)
November 16th, 2009 10:30pm

I have the same problem where D: is in my system image list. I do have three services running from the D: Drive. My OS partition is only a 32 GB solid state drive, so I installed everything to my 3 TB Raid Array (D:). If I uninstall those programs and reinstall them to C:, will the system image not include D:?
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November 17th, 2009 9:01pm

OK, I've figured this out. Steve0212 is right. The reason I had D: included in my System Image creation was that in my Startup folder I was starting an application on the D drive. I just removed the D: install and installed to C:. And now I no longer have the D drive included by default in my System Image ! YAHOO! thorne
November 17th, 2009 10:37pm

Ok, so the program causing this for me is a game "Dragon Age: Origins", however I do not have space to install games on my boot drive (SSD). Suggestions so far is to tinker with the registry referring to the service during backup (change D: to C:) or install to C:. My suggestion is to to give the user a choice (and warn about consequences possibly put it in the back up log). EA support finally got back to me and the only way to get the service on the system drive (aka C:) and not the drive where I install games (D:) is to install to C:. Ah well.
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November 21st, 2009 6:25am

Hi, I have the same problem and I also know the reason for it: Win7 includes both C and D for me because I have the pagefile and also the TEMP/TMP dirs on my D drive. Now how lame is it not to allow the user to select which drive really is the system one??
December 24th, 2009 7:39am

Hi Suhas I've tried every possible solution mentioned in this post without success. On my Windows 7, drive D: has suddenly "added itself" to the system image - don't know exactly what changed when it started happening. Anything else I can try? Thanks in advance Jose
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June 29th, 2010 7:18pm

With the help of Suhas -and a PowerShell script he provided- I've found the cause of drive D: being included in the system image. In my particular case was a windows service running from a folder in D: drive. I uninstalled the service and everything went back to normal, the system image only includes drive C: Thanks everyone for their postings Regards, Jose
June 30th, 2010 1:42pm

Jose_Marcenaro - Where do I get this PowerShell script that Suhas supplied to you. I really think this script will be a great service to all of us with this issue. Thanks, Dawid
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August 22nd, 2010 8:52am

Anything come to light with this issue, I need to create a system image asap, and I don't want one of my drives to be included as it's a Ram drive... I just want the C Drive and the System reservered to be included. The only thing that should be running off my RAM disk, is my Firefox Cache/ IE Cache, and my user profiles temp directory... nothing else. Each time I try to create a image it fails. Here's a bit of text taken from the error log <Data>ASR Writer</Data> <Data>A critical volume selected for backup exists on a disk which cannot be backed up by ASR. (0x80042411)</Data> I've never had this issue before with this set-up... someone help!!!!
July 29th, 2011 10:27am

Hi,Jose, Could you share the powershell script with us? Thank you!
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February 21st, 2012 9:46am

The Above answer does not address the question asked. The number one answer should be that you have to check to see if you have anything installed on the other drive that starts up when windows starts. The best way to do this is to look in your system configurations to see what services and applications start up on boot. Check under the two tabs Startup and services. This is where you will find the dependent program or service. I also uninstalled all apps that were installed on the other drive.
July 26th, 2012 11:46pm

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