LBA Mode vs Disk Imaging

[PeteK]

I thought I had an quick and easy way to clone my main boot partition, but
after threr days of miserable failure, I am beginning to have my doubts...
My approach involves moving an internal EIDE drive that has LBA mode set in
the BOIS to an external USB2 drive rack. The cloning procedure appears to
complete OK, and I can boot so far into windows XP, but not completely - the
PC just hangs.

Original config:
Partitioned Master, with 12GB boot partition.
Partitioned Slave.
External USB drive (empty).

Step1: Replace Master with another bootable drive.
Step2. Place original Master in USB2 rack.
Step3: Clone boot partition from USB2 to Slave.
The above is just to avoid cloning the active boot drive, but that fails
too.
Step 4: Put new clone in Master position and reboot.

All drives are jumpered for CABLE-SELECT.
Each time I change drives, I check that the disks are configured as expected
in the BIOS.
The little widows XP logo is displayed, but then it hangs before displaying
the desktop.

I've tried using partition magic v7 and Acronis TRueImage 9 for the cloning
operation, with the same results. I wondered if I was doing something stupid
by switching LBA-enabled internal drives to an external bay. The cloned
partition looks OK when the drive is mounted as a slave; it juist won't
boot.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Pete K

 

[Michael C]

I thought I had an quick and easy way to clone my main boot partition, but
after threr days of miserable failure, I am beginning to have my doubts...
My approach involves moving an internal EIDE drive that has LBA mode set in
the BOIS to an external USB2 drive rack. The cloning procedure appears to
complete OK, and I can boot so far into windows XP, but not completely -
the PC just hangs.

Why put the drive in an external bay to clone it? Why not just use the
internal IDE?

Michael

 

[PeteK]

Michael,

The only reason to use the external bay is that I only have two IDE channels
(the other two are taken up with DVD writers). The reason that I want to
use three drives rather than to avoid cloning from an active boot drive, as
this is faster and more reliable (it fails less, in my experience).

Pete K

Pete K

 

[Ian East]

I thought I had an quick and easy way to clone my main boot partition, but
after threr days of miserable failure, I am beginning to have my doubts...
My approach involves moving an internal EIDE drive that has LBA mode set in
the BOIS to an external USB2 drive rack. The cloning procedure appears to
complete OK, and I can boot so far into windows XP, but not completely - the
PC just hangs.

Original config:
Partitioned Master, with 12GB boot partition.
Partitioned Slave.
External USB drive (empty).

Step1: Replace Master with another bootable drive.
Step2. Place original Master in USB2 rack.
Step3: Clone boot partition from USB2 to Slave.
The above is just to avoid cloning the active boot drive, but that fails
too.
Step 4: Put new clone in Master position and reboot.

All drives are jumpered for CABLE-SELECT.
Each time I change drives, I check that the disks are configured as expected
in the BIOS.
The little widows XP logo is displayed, but then it hangs before displaying
the desktop.

I've tried using partition magic v7 and Acronis TRueImage 9 for the cloning
operation, with the same results. I wondered if I was doing something stupid
by switching LBA-enabled internal drives to an external bay. The cloned
partition looks OK when the drive is mounted as a slave; it juist won't
boot.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Pete K

I really don't think this has anything to do with LBA. Sounds more to
me like some kind of device change that XP doesn't like. Are you able
to clone the disk from one IDE channel to another?

 

[Michael C]

Michael,

The only reason to use the external bay is that I only have two IDE
channels (the other two are taken up with DVD writers). The reason that I
want to use three drives rather than to avoid cloning from an active boot
drive, as this is faster and more reliable (it fails less, in my
experience).

So just remove the DVDs when you do the clone. It would at least be worth
doing it as a test to see if the USB is causing the problem.

Michael

 

[PeteK]

I really don't think this has anything to do with LBA. Sounds more to

me like some kind of device change that XP doesn't like. Are you able
to clone the disk from one IDE channel to another?

Yes, I can clone the disk directly from the EIDE Master to to EIDE Slave
(On the same channel). The effect is the same: the cloning operation appears
to work, but the disk won't boot. I'm going to try using Norton GHOST
instead of partition magic (using IDE channels as you suggested), but I
wanted to try the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT commands of the windows recovery
colsole first. That didn't work either.

I'll report back.

Thanks for yur sugestion.

Pete K

 

[PeteK]

It appears that my probelms were due to a corrupt registry. I don't think
that Ghost or Partition magic copies from active boot drives can be relied
upon. The Ghost recovery envrionment detected and fixed the registry (with
possible loss of data), giving me a second boot disk. This enabled me to
successfully clone the orignial boot disk (installed in the external USB
caddy, so it wasn't active at the time) to a third drive.

So, my problems were not LBA-related (I hope that there are several people
shouting "I TOLD YOU SO !" at this point) after all. Nor, were they due to
broken Boot files or MBRs. Nevertheless I've learned a few tricks from the
suggestions I received here, and I am very grateful to all who helped me
out.

Cheers,

Pete K