Solved Backup->Create System Image misidentifies disk as system disk

[jwalton]

When I upgraded to Windows 7, I bought a new mobo, graphics card, etc... I installed Windows 7 on a new 128GB SSD drive (C: ), and then pulled my old 1TB drive with Windows XP on it from my old machine and installed it as D:.

When I try to go to "Backup and Restore", and click "Create a system image", Backup and Restore misidentifies my old 1TB drive as a System disk, so I can't create a backup on it, and Windows demands that it be part of the backup, even though it's mostly just documents on this drive (there are some programs installed on this drive - Steam and Microsoft Flight - is having software installed to this drive enough to make Windows think it's a system drive?)

I've already marked the D: drive as "inactive", deleted D:\Windows and all the cruft associated with it (pagefile.sys, etc...). Disk Management shows C: as "Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition", and shows the "System Reserved" partition on the same drive (the D: drive wasn't plugged in when I installed Windows 7.) Disk Management shows D: as "Primary Partition", and that's it.

diskpart "details disk" shows this for D:

DISKPART> detail disk

WDC WD1001FALS-00J7B0
Disk ID: 9A9E9A9E
Type   : ATA
Status : Online
Path   : 0
Target : 1
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#ATA(C00T01L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only  : No
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No
Clustered Disk  : No

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 3     D   Documents    NTFS   Partition    931 GB  Healthy

No "Boot" or "System" in the Info column.

So... What's left? What do I have to do to make this not be a "system" drive in Backup and Restore's eyes?

 

[mjf]

Based on what you've said it is puzzling. I'd be tempted to take a simple approach - backup my data on the old HDD and run a quick format.

 

[jwalton]

Figured it out. I mentioned I had Steam installed on D. I also had a bunch of Steam games (naturally), Microsoft Flight, and Tribes: Ascend by Hi-Rez Studios (via Steam, but when you first run it from Steam it installs a few other bits.) I was trying to move everything off of D:. When I tried to move Tribes: Ascend, it claimed that certain files were in use by the "Hi-Rez Studios Authenticate and Update Service". Yes, Tribes: Ascend installs a system service along with itself, which does who knows what. I started thinking, though, "What if Windows sees this as a system drive because there are system services installed on it?" Since I'd already moved Steam off onto another drive, trying to uninstall Tribes failed. So I pulled up a command prompt with administrator privileges, and did a "sc delete HiPatchService". Sure enough, my D drive is no longer a system drive.

 

[mjf]

Good to see you got it sorted.