It is also know as DiskID 'Disk ID', 'NT serial number', or 'Partition Signature'. In the DOS prompt it is apparently called 'Volume Serial Number'. You can most easily see the volume ID by opening a command prompt window and saying DIR C: /p. Note that I am talking about the volume ID, not about the volume name. The solution in all of these cases is to alter the volume ID of one HDD, so that no two logical drives share the same volume ID. In a less severe case of volume ID conflicts, other applications such as Acronis True Image may hang or crash. The typical Windows failure mode after such a SNAFU is that you get the login window, but when you log in, you are immediately logged out again. Once such a thing has happened, neither HDD might be able to boot on its own, since drive letters are now cross-assigned. Since Windows uses these volume ID bytes to assign drive letters etc., bad stuff can happen if you hook up the original HDD and its exact clone to a windows machine at the same time.įor example, if you boot up Windows with two such HDDs attached (one original, one clone), then Windows may boot with its left leg on the original HDD, and with the right leg on the clone HDD, figuratively speaking. This means that these two HDDs also have the exact same volume ID bytes in the MBR. The issue seemed to be that I had multiple physical hard disk drives, and one of those was an exact clone of the other. This was under Windows XP, but it may also apply to other windows versions. However, recently it would often hang or crash altogether - for example, when I clicked 'backup', it would display a progress bar and the message 'Analyzing Partition C:', but it would simply hang there and never complete. I used Acronis True Image in the past with good success.

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