Macrium Reflect 8 - Not seeing USB drive to clone my system to?

[gizmo1990]

I'm going to move my current 120gb system drive over to a roomier 500gb one. I've created a Macrium Bootable Rescue USB and boot into it. However, when I choose to clone the system drive I can't select the connected (it's in a caddy) 500gb USB one? I only get the option to select the tiny 4gb usb pen drive I'm booting from? The 500gb is nowhere to be seen.

Does anyone know why this would be happening? I can see the 500gb one fine in windows 10 and it's formatted with NTFS, the same as the system drive. I can also see the drive fine if I run Macrium from windows. However, I'd like to do the clone via a bootable USB environment to get a 100% exact clone. I'd always been told that is best practice.

Any advice much appreciated.

 

[Undesirable]

I'm guessing some requisite driver or another is not being loaded up in the boot disk OS. My advice would be to just do it in Windows. I believe there's an option to verify that the clone is 100% complete.

 

[gizmo1990]

@Undesirable Thanks for that. I did the clone via windows as you suggested and it's worked perfectly.

One thing though, I've now got an additional 500mb D: drive showing up in windows called Recovery? I think this is created by Macrium in case of some incident? I presume I should be able to delete it though and put its space into the main partition. However going into disk management I can't perform any function like that on it. Does anyone know how I can get rid of this and repurpose the space?

 

[Snapshot]

The recovery partition needs to be adjacent to the main partition for it to be possible to merge them. With the EFI prtition in between, there's nothing you can do with it. I know it's irritating having it there but 0.5GB on a 500GB drive is 0.1% - not really worth worrying about.

 

[gizmo1990]

Thanks for the reply @Snapshot That's interesting. Why didn't I have this issue when I did this type of cloning the last time on a windows 7 system a few years back? It is super annoying having a d: drive showing up in file manager. I feel like disk management used to allow me to change the drive letter/path but all I get when I right click on it now is 'help'. Surely I can at least get windows to not be assigning it a drive letter? Searching around there seems to be mention of using disk part to get rid of it. Does anyone have experience of doing that?

 

[gizmo1990]

I wonder if this is a symptom of creating the clone in Windows and not via the bootable usb route I did the last time?

 

[gizmo1990]

Managed to sort this. I think my setup has a issue with a windows 10 update 1803 whereby the recovery drive isn't being hidden by windows and is being assigned a drive letter. I've sorted it by using Diskpart. Here's a thread which details it.

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