Acronis and Hard Drive Confusion

My Vista computer is working fine – but I am having a slight problem with Acronis.

If I inspect the drives using Disk Management in Control Panel, I can see both my internal hard drives , each being divided into two partitions.

Disk O…. Appears as drives E: and F:
Disk 1….Appears as drives C: and D:

The critical thing is that my C: drive contains the OS and all programmes. Hence the computer knows that the OS is on Disk 1 and seems happy with it. Explorer lists the drives in alphabetical order no problem.

The problem is with Acronis – I can take back-ups of the C: drive and can select the E: drive to store them. However, when I try to do a restore Acronis thinks that the OS and programmes are on the E: drive (presumably because it is on Disk 0). I therefore have to select the E: drive as the location to restore the OS and programmes and Acronis will happily write the restore to what is actually the C: drive. It is very confusing and is bound to lead to grief at some future time when I forget to transpose things.

It seems to me that the answer is swap the identity of the hard drives so that C: is on Drive 0 – rather than Drive 1.

What is the best way of getting drives C: and D: onto Disk 0 and drives E: and F: onto Disk 1 – hopefully without the need to reinstall Vista and programmes all over again.

Is it as simple as swapping the drives physically in the tower – if so – will the computer boot OK or do I also have to fiddle with the BIOS.

Or…is it possible to make a change in the BIOS that will fix the problem – if so – what and how.

as for me....i would done as you said "swapping the drives physically in the tower "

Following advice received from another place I swapped the connecting cables over on my two SATA hard drives.

I then opened the BIOS and changed the hard drive boot order so that drive 0 was first in the list

All is now OK.

It transpired that my system builder did a repair for me (under warranty) a few weeks ago and inadvertently swapped the SATA cables over. When the computer didn't boot he realised what had happened and rather than open up the tower again to change the cables back - he altered the boot order in the BIOS. This normally would not matter - but if you use Acronis problems obviously result.