I know you weren't talking to me Dave but the second time I tried to copy a
boot drive using Maxblast 3 from floppy I went through all the options in
'repair' to no avail. I tried 'fixboot' amonst others ('fixmbr' 'bootcfg'
and whatever else I thought might help after typing 'command' ? to see what
they did).
It doesn't NEED to be. But why would you NOT want it to be?
The idea behind the whole procedure is to not use the cloned drive
until needed...until you have a catastrophe where its necessary to put
the cloned drive in the machine to replace the original, booting
drive.
A cloned drive is usually prepared to replace the original drive when
necessary.
I'm not following you, Tim. Why would you want to do that? That's
not the goal of cloning.
Trent© said:You must be...I do it all the time. XP and w2k are a little
fussy...they'll actually read and tell you that you have a different
drive. But that's about all.
Sorry. I understand about being an invalid. I'm half Polish!
Yours is not the only scenario for HD clones. I use 2 HDs for
software development - one for Java, the other for C#, because
some of the software doesn't get along (perhaps by Microsoft design).
I have 4 HDs running. I periodically clone both development HDs to
the backup HDs because it's easier to just copy everything than to do
incremental backups, but sometimes with important files I copy them
over to the backup HD immediately.
That gives me recent milestones
for archiving and an immediately available backup to use in case of HD
failure. If a failure should occur, I don't want to futz around with physically
changing HDs but rather to continue rolling due to tight schedules
(I'm a student).
In my system, I use Drive Image 2002 for cloning. I also have 2 33MB/s
motherboard resident IDE channels and 2 133MB/s PCI card IDE channels.
I find that cloning involving the PCI card channels doesn't work - I have to
use (perhaps until I find better cloning software) a single motherboard 33MB/s
channel and clone Master to Slave. Once booted as an isolated Master HD,
I can thereafter move the HDs to a faster PCI card channel and select which
one to boot by changing the BIOS boot sequence.
What you assume - a single HD cloned to a HD that is usually kept in
a bank deposit box or closet somewhere - is merely a common scenario,
but it isn't the *only* scenario.
So...what do you do? Don't you hafta reboot? And then what drive do
you boot into?
Are you asking for solutions here?...or do you already have a system
in place for yourself?
Booting into a D drive is asking for problems. I've done it...and it
can cause havoc on a Windows system.
...My query is because its rare indeed to clone from a C drive
to a D drive...and then BOOT from the D drive. It can be done,
of course...but invites all kinds of problems. And so does changing
over the drives to different controllers...which are at different
speeds...without adjusting the ATA speed of the drive.
Again...I'm not sure if yer lookin' for advice...or if you just wanted
to explain how yer doin' things.
"Trent©" wants more:
I restart, reset the BIOS sequence so that the new HD is
listed 1st, and then boot into the new HD.
The drive designation is a function of the HD that is booted.
When the (previously) D drive is booted, it thinks it's the C drive,
and it designates some other drive as the D drive. I don't run
programs from the other drives - they're only file structures as
far as the new C drive is concerned, and that allows me to copy
files to them.
Everyone gets into thinking that the solution he hit upon is *the*
solution for cloning HDs. I just wanted to probe the experience of
others to see if there is something that I've missed that I could use.
I feel that unless I know what the real limiting factors are, much of
what I'm doing could actually be mere superstitious behavior. That
is, I could be thinking that my way is the *only * way merely because
I succeeded with it at one time. So my questions were genuine, and
I appreciate your replies.
Timothy Daniels said:But then what is your purpose of doing a clone in the FIRST place? I
thought it was for security...so you always have a good drive/data to
fall back on.
If you do the above, you've by-passed the bad data drive by booting
into the good-data drive. You now have a drive with bad data...and
one good drive...that yer now working from. You have NO backup to
revert to if something happens to this now working drive.
"Trent©" went on:
Yeeesss..... The drive to which I would boot is the backup, the drive
containing the clone - which is made periodically for that contingency.
Yeeesss... What's the problem?
1) How many backups do you need?
2) Must all backups be non-working?
3) Did you read the part where I intend to backup periodically
to a removeable drive, too? Then there would be a clone
that I could keep off-site as well. But it could be booted
up into a "working" drive, if I would want, too.
What's this distinction that you make between drives that
are used to hold data and drives that are used to hold data and
an operating system?
And why do you feel that the data on
the former are safer?