Yes, I've attempted to assist him storing on his other internal. My point is that if he has system files on that HDD he should know what they are then decide to move them or get rid of them. To repeat:
1) Find out exactly what is on F:
2) Disconnect F: to see if he is actually booting through F: by some chance (=not good)
I think it is possible that a partition on F: may "solve" the problem but the OP will never know the root cause of the problem.
How to Create a System Image in Windows 7
Decidewhere you want to save the image. You can choose an external drive, burn to multiple DVD’s, or store it on a network location.
3-img
Last edited by Gary; 11 Mar 2013 at 19:48.
I have done it many times on different drives, different partitions, different PCs. It is only correct to say that you could not, for whatever reason, in your situation.
I don't want to appear rude Gary but you are making a sweeping statement which is incorrect.
By the way the OP may have left.
I suspect that the OP has something that belongs to the system on that drive. In that case the system would refuse to image to that drive/partition. That's why I suggested to create a second (empty) partition on the drive and image to that.
I wanted to be able to use the Windows 7 backup program but it still won't let me save a drive image to the F drive.
I did however manage to save an image using Acronis 2010 to the F drive. Looks like that's going to be my default backup program.
Thank you everyone for your help!
If anyone stumbles upon this while searching for a solution to this problem via Google like I did - check your system services (Start > Run > services.msc) for anything pointing to the disk you're trying to backup to.
I had exactly the same problem with Windows "Backup and Restore" tool not letting me backup my C: disk to a secondary HDD (D:). After trying various things it turned out that the culprit was some "Futuremark SystemInfo service" from 3DMark which was installed on D:.
In fact, I had uninstalled it by that time, but the service still remained listed in the registry. I deleted it manually via regedit, and voila, backup starts working. This would also explain why OP couldn't backup to his drive even after formatting it. I bet it was some leftover system service still listed in the registry from whatever software that used to be installed on the HDD.
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