External USB Hard Drive Backup not being found

[dave60707]

The “E” drive became missing. I added the drive letter in Disc Management but backup still can’t find it.
Please see attached screen shot. I’m guessing it has to do with Systems Reserve but can’t figure out how to fix that partition which I never saw before. I used Windows Image to backup and then recently tried to save a clone with Macrium Reflect but it failed with a message error 13 broken pipe.
Help please,
Dave

 

[maxseven]

Have you simply tried setting the drive to a different letter other than E?

 

[dave60707]

Hi maxseven,
Thanks for your reply. I have just tried your suggestion of renaming it with an unused letter but to no avail. Could the Macrium Reflect cloning software have created the System Reserve partition (it that's what it is)? Should I just reformat the external hard drive?
Dave

 

[whs]

The E partition is a tiny little partition. What do you want to do with it. The space behind it is very big and could be used for backup. But you have to first define a partition in that space.

 

[maxseven]

The E partition is a tiny little partition.

Yes, it appears to me OP that you did perhaps err in some way asking Macrium to back-up your primary hard drive, and thus all it did was create that 100MB System Reserved partition and left the rest of the drive alone. I don't use Macrium so can't imagine how this might happen--must be the result of the "broken pipe" error.

But to guess: you tried to make a "clone" with Macrium and what you really want to do is create a Backup Image of that drive, which BTW can hold many multiple backups of your original (and why does your original have such a large unused space?).

I'd try running Macrium again and don't select Clone this time. Again, dunno Macrium but if it doesn't like your unformatted drive you may have to format it first as whs suggests.

 

[dave60707]

Hi Maxseven,
Yes Macrium created that small E partition and was probably going to save the clone in the large partition but for some reason crashed. I renamed and formatted the large partition and it failed again.
So I then reformatted the drive in windows and just successfully completed a window image backup.
I really appreciate your help.
Thank you very much,
Dave

 

[maxseven]

Hi Maxseven,
Yes Macrium created that small E partition and was probably going to save the clone in the large partition but for some reason crashed. I renamed and formatted the large partition and it failed again.
So I then reformatted the drive in windows and just successfully completed a window image backup.
I really appreciate your help.
Thank you very much,
Dave

You're welcome. Maybe your Macrium installation is corrupt--people here swear by it.

 

[dave60707]

Problem Solved

I discovered that the problem was with many errors on the hard drive that I was trying to clone. I used Seagate's SeaTools for DOS to test the drive. I had to run it 5 times before all the errors were repaired but it did a commendable job fixing every single one. Thank you Seagate, and you very helpful folks at SevenForums.
Dave