Backup Bootup Hard Drive

[NightOwl]

In the event of an emergency, I want a backup hard drive
that is identical to my main hard drive and is ready to
boot up when my main hard drive becomes inoperable. So I
cloned my hard drive.

However, my cloned hard drive won't boot up unless the
main hard drive is connected. That's not much help in an
emergency if my main hard drive crashes now is it? I want
both hard drives to have the ability to boot up. In other
words, I want each drive to have its own system and boot
partitions. Each time I boot up, I want the option of
choosing which hard drive I want to boot up from even
though each hard drive has the same OS.

I imagine that my problem has to do with the fact that my
system and/or boot partitions are on one drive but not
the other.

According to Disk Management my main hard drive has a
volume substatus of "System" and my cloned hard drive has
a volume substatus of "Page File". According to Partition
Magic 8.0, each hard drive has an "Active" status.

Thanks

 

[Alex Nichol]

In the event of an emergency, I want a backup hard drive
that is identical to my main hard drive and is ready to
boot up when my main hard drive becomes inoperable. So I
cloned my hard drive.

However, my cloned hard drive won't boot up unless the
main hard drive is connected.

You will have cloned the partition, but not provided the drive with the
initial master boot code needed to boot it up, nor marked the partition
as Active. Depending on what software you used for the cloning, that
may provide for these too, or once you put it back as master drive to
boot from, you can use a Win98 startup floppy and its FDISK to do
FDISK /MBR
and then
FDISK
and use Set active partition. (or you can do that from the repair mode
of booting the XP CD, using
Fixmbr
and then the
diskpart
command - look that up in Help and Support