Partitions - Active, System, Boot

[John Evans]

I want a backup hard drive that is a clone of my primary
drive. In the event my primary drive crashes, I want to
be able to boot up from my backup drive.

I cloned my primary drive, however, when I disconnect the
primary drive, the backup drive doesn't start up. The
start process goes like this: There's a black screen with
a windows XP splash screen and a blue progess bar that
goes from left to right. After that screen, I get a blue
screen with a logo of Windows XP. It pauses forever at
this point and never progresses further.

How can I have Windows XP Professional on each hard
drive, with each drive having an active partition, its
own boot partition, and own system partition?

According to Partition Magic, each drive is designated as
primary and active. However when I attempt to merge two
partitions on one of the drives I get a warning "there is
no active partition. Are you sure you want to apply
changes". This is weird because the status for the drive
is active and primary. Also, when I right click on the
drive, "set active" under advanced is grayed out.

According to disk management the status of the disk
is "Healthy (Page File)". The status of the other hard
drive is "Healthy (System File).

Thanks for the help.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

You need a 3rd party boot manager to handle this. BootIt Next Generation is
a great product for this.

You can only have 1 active partition at a time, and the BIOS does not,
generally, set a partition active. It expects to find one. Some newer
BIOS's will allow you to select the boot device during the boot sequence.

A boot manager like BootIt will handle assigning active partitions,
partition order, hiding partitions and etc, by the use of Boot Menu Items.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Sorry, BootIt can be found at www.bootitng.com 30 day shareware.

 

[Guest]

I guess I should have mentioned that I did properly
change the jumper cables, and yet it still wouldn't
startup.

 

[Jessica Thornton]

According to Norton's KB, a dual-boot, same OS clone disk
cannot be created while both drives are connected to the
same computer. The reasons offered are because both
drives have a partition that is marked as Active in the
partition tablelocation and because the sector address
changes during the cloning process due to the copy mode
used. Any ideas to make this work?

Two KB articles from Norton's site are reprinted below
for your convenience titled "Computer cannot start
properly after doing a disk-to-disk clone" and "Dual Boot
System Boots Only NT After Cloning"

=============
(1) Computer cannot start properly after doing a disk-to-
disk clone

Situation:
You copied one disk to another disk on the same computer
by using Ghost to perform a disk-to-disk clone. When you
start the computer, you see any of the following problems:

Messages indicating problems with the hardware or
software configuration
Messages indicating that an application cannot find a file
Windows is running in MS DOS Compatibility Mode
Windows will start in Safe Mode but not in Normal Mode
The computer cannot access one or more drives after the C
drive, such as a CD-ROM drive or removable drive

Solution:
This problem happens when you perform a disk-to-disk
clone and leave both drives in the computer after Ghost
finishes cloning. The problem happens because Windows
sometimes reassigns the drive letters, and because both
drives have a partition that is marked as Active in the
partition table.

To resolve the problem:

Turn off the computer
Remove the second drive from the computer
Restart the computer.

If some of the problems still appear, shutdown the
computer and restart it. Windows sometimes requires more
than one restart to repair registry inconsistencies.

To prevent this problem, remove one of the drives after
Ghost completes the disk-to-disk clone but before you
restart the computer into Windows.

Another way to avoid the problem is to perform a disk-to-
image clone instead of disk-to-disk clone. A disk-to-
image clone creates an image of the hard disk and saves
that image as a file at another location, such as on
another local hard drive.

============================

(2) Dual Boot System Boots Only NT After Cloning

Situation:
You are dual booting Windows NT and another operating
system. When you clone the drive, NT is still bootable,
but the other operating system is not. SYSing the drive
causes the other operating system to become bootable, but
NT stops being bootable.

Solution:
You are using a boot manager that addresses boot profiles
by Direct Sector Addressing. When you boot the drive, the
information in the Master Boot Record tells the system to
go to a specific sector address to get information about
booting. For NT that sector does not change. However, for
the alternative operating system, the sector address
changes during the cloning process due to the copy mode
used. This makes the information unavailable to the
system, and it will appear to hang. Restoring the system
files with the SYS command tells the system where to find
boot information, but destroys the link to the NT boot
information, removing the NT boot option.

Using DiskClone Regular Strength, the only solution is to
SYS the drive after the cloning process and re-install
Windows NT. This will restore the boot loader and re-
locate the boot information for the other system in the
new sector.

Using DiskClone Extra Strength or DiskClone Corporate,
you can use All Sectors or Sectors Optimized mode to keep
the same sector address.