Create System Image is including an unwanted drive, Plz Help, Thanx

So, I want to backup my C drive with a complete backup of my Win 10 installation through win 10 "create a system image" but it is including a whole other drive that is just used as a space drive for files. This drive was once used as a boot drive so it does have mbr files hidden on it. I have 6 drives in my computer. 3 hard drives and 3 ssd's. 2 ssd's have windows 7 installed on them and one has my new install of win 10 that I want to backup. I figured out that windows is using the boot files on that other drive, a 2 tb E drive to boot win10 on my 256 gig ssd C drive. So i booted into win7 where i had partition software and made that 2 gig drive inactive to try to force win 10 to boot without relying on the E drive. Win 10 wouldn't boot, so i went back into win7 and re-set that 2 gig E drive back to active and got win 10 to boot again. I have recently heard of a thing called "Fix mbr" command in CMD but i don't know if that will help me. What I think i need to do is make a small partition on the C drive like 350 MB and set it active and get win10 to use that instead but I don't know how to point the win10 to use it instead. Here is a dropbox link to some screen shots that may help. Thanx https://www.dropbox.com/sh/myxq6nphxsgmnpb/AABKzD7oC-mboS5w3CNg_fBma?dl=0

dalchina, thanx for the help, and I will do that because it's the best solution so far but I would still like to get my operating system completely confined to one drive. I never imagined that win10 would make it's self need more than the C drive to boot.

Molecule67 said:

dalchina, thanx for the help, and I will do that because it's the best solution so far but I would still like to get my operating system completely confined to one drive. I never imagined that win10 would make it's self need more than the C drive to boot.

Unfortunately, from your images it seems that when you installed Windows 10 on C: (the partition occupying the whole of Disk 5) the active partition your system boots from is E: (the only partition on the 2TB Disk 0) which is why backup & restore insists on including it in the system image. Without it you cannot restore a system that would boot. While Macrium would allow you to image just the C: partition, it wouldn't be able to restore it as a bootable system without the E: partition being there.

The normal recommendation when installing W10 on a multiple drive system is to temporarily disconnect all but the drive you want to install to. I'm not sure how you would disentangle this after the event, maybe @NavyLCDR would know.

I would have done that but i have run into problems where chkdsk run from another windows install on a different drive can ruin your win 10 drive making it unbootable and the solution was to install win10 with all drives connected so that it knows the other os's are there and includes them in its security so chkdsk wont ruin them after that. I may have to start all over with a clean install of win10 with all drives disconnected, if that is what it takes to get a good one drive image. thanx

If I'm wrong about this check disk thing, that running chkdsk from win7 on a drive with win10 can ruin the file system because of unknown security descriptors making win10 unbootable, , please let me know. I may be concerned about a non-issue.

Thanx for the help. I wiped the drive, unplugged all others and re-installed windows 10. It's a lot of work to get it all back the way I want it but now my OS is all on one drive and I can back it up properly.

Molecule67 said:

... It's a lot of work to get it all back the way I want it...

It would probably have been as much work (and more stressful) to unpick the system and reconfigure it to boot from one drive.