Issues with external hard drives

[PeteK]

Tim,

Two comments:

1) You don't mention that you isolated the newly made
clone before its 1st startup. If you did not, that could
account for the registry changes. It's important that
the new clone does not "see" its "parent" OS during
its 1st startup or it seems to set pointers to files in
the "parent" instead of to the identical files in its own
file hierarchy. Things seem to work fine until the
"parent" OS is removed and the clone suddenly sees
that those files have disappeared. You can start up
the "parent" with the new unvetted clone visible to it,
but you cannot start up the clone with the "parent"
visible to the clone until the clone has had its 1st
startup in isolation. Thereafter, the clone CAN be
started with the "parent" OS visible, and it will see
the "parent" as just another Local Disk with its own
file structure.

When first attempting to boot from the cloned drive, I have always isolated
it. I had a bad experience several years ago when the OS (win95, I think)
"helpfully" reassigned any shortcuts that I had touched since booting to a
new drive. I'm pretty sure that at least on the occasion that I restored
from a Ghost backup ( rather than a Ghost clone operation), that the
registry corruption was caused by the clone/restore process itself.

2) Give Casper XP a try. It will clone the partition that
it is running from without having to drop down to DOS
and without leaving Windows, it does NOT need
.NET Framework to be installed on the system, and
it will clone a single partition from among many, and
it will put that single partition among many on another
hard drive. You can download a free 30-day trial copy
from www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/ .

Thanks, I haven't tried that one. Yes, the dependency upon .net is another
of my gripes with Ghost.

Cheers,

Pete K

 

[PeteK]

Like what ?

Errors partitioning a brand-new drive: I tried creating a 12GB partition,
and everything seemed to be fine as I progressed through the wizard, but the
final result was a 7MB (yes, MB) partition. I thought at first that I was
doing something stupid (surely not ?), but if I was, I made the same mistake
repeatedly. Eventually, I let it go to completion and used Partition Magic
to expand the result to 12GB. The recovery CD would not recognise my
external USB drives, and I couldn't get the PC to power down - it kept
rebooting instead. Normally, I can just hold in the power button for a few
seconds. I'm prepared to accept that I might have been abusing the software
unknowingly, but I did read the documentation carefully. There were some
other problems too, but I can't remember the details.

No reason why you cant use TI 8 while the blemishes are sorted out.

I may try to see if I can get an evaluation copy of v8 instead.

Thats a bit unclear. The one I tried claimed that it could be used
for 15 days..<snipped>

I think that I read that this feature was disabled in the PDF manual.

Thanks for the feedback, too rare IMO.

Under the circumstances, it was the least I could do.

Pete K