Joe Ready said:
I have a machine running Windows XP Pro that is almost tapped
out for disk space. The existing HDD is an IDE 100 and my
motherboard supports SATA-RAID. If I install a new HDD and
use Drive Image or similar to clone my present drive will I run afoul
of Microsofts XP registration?
I think MickeySoft doesn't care if the HD is used in the same PC.
In any event, MS doesn't have to know and WinXP won't complain
unless there is a major change in system hardware.
If I were to add an SATA drive as a second drive,
without copying the existing drive, am I asking for problems due to
the speed mismatch?
I've copied drives with a worse speed mismatch than yours
(from 33MB/s to 133MB/s). As long as both drives are part
of the ATA spec it's OK.
Is it even possible to clone an XP Pro drive?
Yes, no problem. It doesn't matter if both drives are on the
same or different IDE cables. Just follow Rod Speed's admonishment
to electrically disconnect the old drive from the system before booting
up the new drive for the 1st time. You can do that by unplugging
either the IDE cable or the power cable to the old drive. Unplugging
an IDE cable from a drive at the end of a 3-connector IDE cable
is dis-recommended, though, if there is a working device at the
intermediate connector because the open circuit at the end connector
will cause signal reflections which *might* confuse the intermediate
device. If you don't "hide" the old drive from the new drive during
that 1st boot-up, the file systems can start pointing to each other and
the systems meld. It doesn't matter, BTW, which drive is Master
or Slave if they are on the same IDE cable during cloning. If they
are on different IDE cables and they are the sole devices on their
respective IDE cables, jumpering doesn't matter at all.
After the new drive has been booted up once, the old drive
can be reconnected and either OS can be booted up by either:
1) Making the desired drive higher in the BIOS's boot priority,
or by
2) Using the multi-boot feature of WinXP on the boot drive to boot
from either drive. The latter *might* require a little touching up
of the boot.ini file of the boot drive by listing the two OSes after
the '[operating systems]' line by altering the text description
between the two double quotes to be more meaningful to you.
In the first part of each OS line, 'rdisk' means "relative disk" and
it refers to the physical disk's relative position in the BIOS boot
priority. In this priority, the boot disk is disk(0), and the other
disk is disk(1). The 'partition' refers to the partition that the OS
resides on. In this scheme, the 1st partition is partition(1), and
the 2nd partition is partition(2). Your drives will probably have
their OSes both on partition(1).
The multi-boot feature will probably be set up automatically once
the OSes spot each other. (It sort of happens magically, and I
have yet to know exactly how.) But the OS lines in the boot.ini
file are quite undescriptive, calling one OS "Windows XP #1" and
the other OS "Windows XP #2" or some such banality. That's
where your touch-up comes in. As a matter of fact, if you use
method 1) above, you might want to remove the OS line in the
boot.ini files which refer to the other drive's OS.
In the cloning procedure, if you run into problems with Drive Image
7 or 7.01, try Drive Image 2002 which comes with Drive Image 7.
It seems to be less buggy and it works with Win XP and Win XP Pro,
although it wasn't written for those OSes. If you start experimenting
with putting your OSes on other partitions, you can use XP's disk
management system to set the appropriate partition "active". To do
that,
right-click on My Computer and select Manage,
select Disk Management,
right-click on the desired partition and select Mark Partition as Active.
Don't forget to re-adjust the OS line in the boot drive's 1st partition's
boot.ini file to point to the partition where the desired OS resides.
Good luck. If you have any further questions, ask Rod Speed.
*TimDaniels*
