Eddie said:
I have WinXP Professional on a 40 GB hard drive. I just
purchased a 160 GB hard drive and I will be partitioning
it to 3 separate drives. So get a good understanding
what I am doing here, the drives are as follows:
c: 40 GB (old hard drive) bootable WinXP
d: 60 GB (partition 1 of new hard drive) data only
e: 60 GB (partition 2 of new hard drive) data only
f: 40 GB (partition 3 of new hard drive) duplicte copy of drive c:
My question is...
Can I mirror the 40 GB hard drive over to one of the
newly partitioned (drive f
160 GB hard drive without
a hitch so that if my 40 GB hard drive were to ever fail,
I can boot up to my new partitioned (drive f
160 GB hard
drive?
Is this possible?
What I believe you want to do is to make a "clone"
of the 40GB C: partition which contains the OS such
that you could boot it up as a backup OS. If so,
this is how you can do it:
Get yourself a copy of Norton Ghost or Casper XP.
The latter is cheaper, *and* you can download a free
trial copy from
www.FSSdev.com/products/casperxp/ .
With the 1st HD as Master, connect the 2nd HD on the
same IDE cable and jumper it as Slave. This keeps the
1st HD at the head of the BIOS's HD boot order (i.e. it
will boot rather than the 2nd HD). This could be done in
many other ways, but this way takes advantage of defaults
and keeps the procedure conceptually simple.
Partition the 2nd HD so that you leave 41GB of unallo-
cated space on the drive for the 3rd partition. With
your copy utility, copy C: to the unallocated space on
the 2nd HD. Since you left 41GB of free space, the
C: partition will fit there. (An alternative would be to
use Partition Magic to shrink the C: partition down by
1 or 2GB.)
If the clone will reside in the 3rd partition, add a 2nd
entry to the boot.ini file in the 1st HD (at C:boot.ini)
under the "[operating systems]" heading that is like
the 1st entry except that "partition(1)" is changed to
"partition(3)". This is so that the clone will be found
in the 3rd partition when the 2nd HD is booted up.
If you make the clone reside in the 1st partition, nothing
has to be done to boot.ini at this point because the
single entry already there in the "parent's" boot.ini
already points to partition 1.
Then do the copying (i.e. "cloning"). If you're using
Ghost, tell it to copy the 1st HD's MBR as well and
to make the new partition a primary partition and to
mark it "active". Casper XP will do that stuff auto-
matically for you. The copying can take anywhere from
8 to 40 minutes for 40GB
Then "remove" the 1st HD by disconnecting its data
cable, and then start up the system. The 2nd HD will
automatically move to the head of the BIOS's HD boot
order and it will boot up and come to life thinking that
it's in the "Local Disk C:" partition. Do some stuff to
convince yourself that it works just like its "parent" OS.
It is important that the new clone does not "see" its
"parent" OS during its 1st startup, but thereafter, it can
be started with its "parent" visible to it.
Then shut the system down and reconnect the 1st HD,
and start the system again. The OS in the 1st HD will
boot, calling its partition "Local Disk C:" and the new
clone's partition some other letter. You can drag/drop
and cut/paste files between the two partitions as you
wish.
If the 1st HD should fail, just disconnect it and restart
the system - the OS in the 2nd HD will bootup.
If you want to start the clone OS from time to time to,
say update its anti-virus or Windows files, you can do
it in either of 2 ways:
1) Shut down, restart and enter the BIOS and re-arrange
the BIOS's HD boot order so the 2nd HD is at the
head of the boot order list, then restart again. The
OS in the 2nd HD will bootup.
2) Using Notepad, add a 2nd entry in the C:boot.ini
file in the 1st HD under the heading "[operating systems]"
with "rdisk(0)" changed to "rdisk(1)" and "partition(1)"
changed to "partition(3)". This 2nd entry will point to
the clone OS's location for the loader. Make the default
timeout value something like 10 seconds to give yourself
time to agonize over your choice of OSes to load.
During the boot process, a menu derived from these
2 entries will allow you to boot either OS in a procedure
called "dual booting" or "multi-booting". You just indicate
via keyboard input which OS should be loaded.
If you want to maintain several clones, each a version taken
from a different point in time, you can. You just have to under-
stand the Boot.ini syntax well, understand what an "active"
partition implies, and understand the difference between a
"system" partition and a "boot" partition. (Google my name,
Timothy Daniels, for 2005 to see more posts on the subject
than you'll want to read.)
*TimDaniels*