See in-line replies:
Aha! John, that done it.
When I marked that Boot Partition as Active it changed over to Healthy
System, first I did not understand what you meant, seeing that all I could
see was Boot and Active.
Now to the cause, what could have changed it to boot partition?
I'm not sure what caused the partition active flag to be changed, it
could be something to with the disk cloning and the attempted booting of
the cloned drive.
Now there is not any Boot Partitions at all.
The other disk is Active and this one is System.
That is normal if the boot and system partitions are on the same drive.
Remember parts of the earlier definition:
"The system partition can be, but does not have to be, the same volume
as the boot partition."
When the System partition and boot volume are one and the same you won't
see any label for the Boot volume, you will only see the System label to
describe the partition.
Will it change over again if I try to start with the other disk by changing
in BIOS?
The label(s) for the partitions will change depending on which hard disk
is booted, but the active status of the partitions will not. When the
disks are set up independently from each other they will boot to
different System partitions. When you boot the second disk it will
become the System partition and the partition on the first disk will in
its turn simply be labeled as the Active partition. The System and Boot
labels are not persistent, they are applied to the partitions that are
actually used to boot the operating system. Once booted, as far as
Windows is concerned, the other disks which were not used to boot the
operating systems are simple data disks, even if they contain an
operating system and boot files, to Windows they are neither System nor
Boot partitions or volumes, they are just data disks. On independent
drives with completely independent NT operating systems the partition
hosting ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini must be the Active partition.
I thought that if I have the same system on 2 different disk's, then if one
died I would be able to access all the recent files by running it and using
Ghost images that I save there about once a month.
That is a fairly good way of doing it. It is not 100% failsafe, if
lightning hits and completely fries the computer both drives could be
lost, or a nasty virus could wreak havoc on both drives. For that
reason some folks prefer external storage media for the user data. I
think the plan you have is a fairly good arrangement, while not 100%
failsafe, it is unlikely that you will lose both disks at once.
One thing that is important to remember when you clone a hard disk and
attempt to boot it is that the first time the clone is booted the parent
drive should not be visible to the cloned disk. It should be disabled
in the BIOS or the power/data cable to it should be disconnected. After
the cloned drive has been successfully booted once you can then
reconnect or enable the parent hard disk for subsequent boots. If you
don't take this precaution (or take other alternative measures) the
Mount Manager's assignment of drive letters may not correspond to
Windows installed drive letter in the registry and the clone may not
successfully boot. After the first boot, and when both drives are once
again connected, you should be able to boot to one drive or the other by
toggling them in the BIOS boot order.
John
, to