Common Archive Drive For Two Separate System Drives Options

[Tim]

I have a PC with two Western Digital SATA hard drives mounted in removable
trays, each drive has its own instance of Windows XP Pro installed. By using
the lock/power key, of each drive rack, I can power on either drive by
itself and have a completely separate instance of Windows XP Pro. This is
for a family where the kids can have one system drive and the parents can
have the other. That way any problems the kids might cause are isolated to
their own drive.

In addition I have a third Western Digital SATA drive, housed in its own
tray but stored away from the PC when not in use. I use this to make images
of the two system drives.

Since there are only two drive racks in the case, I remove the system drive
from the lower rack and replace it with this archive drive, then I can image
whichever system drive is loaded in the upper rack. However I do have one
concern: by using the same archive drive, for two separate instances of
Windows XP, could Windows ever get "confused" from data written to the
archive drive from two different systems? Could the archive drive get
corrupted by doing this? The system drives are both WD1600JD models, and the
archive drive is a WD2500JD. TIA

System Specs

WinXP Pro, SP2
Intel 865PERL motherboard
2.4 GHz P4 (800MHz FSB)
1 GB dual channel DDR SDRAM
GeForce 6600GT (AGP)
160 GB WD SATA HD

 

[Danny Sanders]

How/What do you use to "archive" files to that drive?

If its just drag and drop you will not have a problem. Multiple computers
users on a network regularly copy files to the server drives.
If you are using some sort of an automated program to do this it at some
point I would think it would give you a chance to name the archive image.
Before restoring the archive I would think it would give you the chance to
choose which archive image to restore.

I don't think you have to worry about Windows getting confused.


hth
DDS W 2k MVP MCSE

 

[Tim]

How/What do you use to "archive" files to that drive?

Many thanks for your reply. I am using the imaging program Acronis
TrueImage 8. Since the source drives have two partitions each (a system
partition and a storage partition), I use TrueImage to create an image of
the system drive. For the storage partition I copy files using Windows
Explorer. Thanks again.