John said:
Does any know how to duplicate a hard drive that the boot records and
structure. This system contains much needed records. It would be
kice to know we had an additional drive with the data intact when
working on the system recovery.
Most new hard drives come with a disk copy utility, but these don't
always work properly with XP. I recommend you download the latest
version of the disk copy utility from the hard disk vendor's web site
and use that utility to dupe the hard disk.
Then swap hard disks in the machine and see if the new hard drive boots.
If it doesn't, you can use fixboot and fixmbr in the Recovery Console on
the XP CD to fix things. This assumes you have one partition. Multiple
partitions (like the hidden Dell partition) make this harder to do,
since most disk copy utilities that come with new hard disks do not copy
multiple partitions.
If the above procedure works, you could mount your new hard drive in a
USB 2.0 enclosure and copy the partition from time to time. Then if your
old disk fails, you can swap in the newer disk and run RC to make the
system boot. Be sure to test this first to make sure it works and write
down the procedure step-by-step because you'll surely forget something
when the time comes. I know this is a legal sort of backup. (Well, I
know it as well as anyone could know the answer to a Microsoft EULA
question without asking a lawyer. As with any intellectual property
issue these days, you never know anything for sure but asking a lawyer
is the proper course since you can always sue your lawyer if they are
wrong. Not having a few thousand dollars to answer your licensing
question is no excuse. Of course, Microsoft isn't as tough as the RIAA,
which will take your life savings if your grandson uses your computer to
download copyrighted songs. I haven't heard of MS doing that to anyone
who violates their EULA, but they could take you for a lot of money if
they wanted to, so it's always best to have a lawyer close at hand when
using Windows and trying to figure out how to backup your system.)
But you would be better served with a partition-copying program that can
also manage your booting. Plug your new hard disk into the system as a
second hard drive and run the partition copy program from time to time
to backup. Use the boot manager to select the other disk if the first
one doesn't boot. Move the backup hard disk to a safe location to
protect against fire, earthquake, terrorist attack, or Homeland Security
Dept. raids.
Whether or not a particular disk copy program violates your EULA is
something you need to ask your Windows lawyer. (Mike Brannigan, the
local MSFT licensing expert, can answer a lot of questions, but his
advice doesn't stand up in court.) But so long as you aren't using your
backup disk to run another computer, you are in the spirit of the EULA
at least. Testing the backup technically violates the EULA since you
have two working copies on the same computer at the same time, but
partition backups are so much simpler than using NTbackup that it is
likely worth the risk.
