Not following you on the parent/adult connection, or how to "remove the parent"
before the first boot up of the clone. Is the parent system the hardware the
clone is being made on i.e. the motherboard, RAM, etc? If so, how can it be
removed?? Thanks.
The "parent" system is the original WinXP that is being copied
from the source HD to a 2nd (i.e. destination) HD which will contain
the clone WinXP system. When the clone is booted for the first time,
it looks around to see its environment, and upon seeing and
recognizing its "parent" WinXP system, it sets some of its pointers
to files in the "parent" instead of within its own file structure. I've
seen and heard of this occurring for random .doc files in My Documents,
resulting in some files residing and being updated in the clone when the
clone is running, and some residing and being updated in the "parent's"
file structure when the clone is running. This confusion of files does
not occur when the "parent" is running - only when the clone is running.
After a while, what you get in the clone is only a partial collection of
the updated files - some are in the "parent" file structure and some
are in the clone's file structure, and the clone will not contain some
of the files that you thought you had updated in the clone's file structure.
If you then take the "parent" away, the clone will seem OK until you
try to access those files.
The solution is to physically remove the source HD, which contains
the "parent" system, when booting the clone for the first time. You can
do this by physically removing the "parent" system's HD from the PC,
or you can just unplug it, or you can just cut the power to the HD with
a toggle switch (like I do). With the "parent" thus invisible to the clone,
the clone can be booted. If there are only 2 HDs to begin with, the
clone's HD will move up in the BIOS's hard drive boot order and be at
the head of the boot order list (i.e. take relative position 0), and the
clone's HD will get control from the BIOS. If the clone's partition is
marked "active", it will get control from the MBR at boot up, and the
clone's boot menu (contained in its boot.ini file) will be displayed.
Since the clone has taken the "parent's" relative position 0, "rdisk(0)"
in the boot menu will refer to it, and all will proceed as if it were
happening for the "parent". If the clone will not be the only partition
on the destination HD, the copy utility should be told to mark the clone's
partition "active". There should also be an entry in its boot.ini file to
refer to the correct partition no. where the clone will reside. This can
be done in two ways:
1) You can make an extra entry in the boot.ini file of the "parent"
before the cloning operation that points to the destination
partition. The boot.ini file will then contain an entry in the boot
menu that points to the clone's partition, and you can select
that entry when the clone is booted.
2) You can boot the PARENT system after the cloning operation
and go into the clone's file structure and edit the CLONE'S
boot.ini file while the PARENT is running. The clone will not
yet have been booted as a system, and no improper links
will be set by booting the "parent".
In editing the boot menu in the clone's boot.ini file, keep in
mind that "rdisk" refers to the relative position of the HD in the
BIOS's hard drive boot order. If there are more than 2 HDs,
the boot order must be checked in the BIOS whenever a HD is
removed or added to be sure that the correct HD is at the head
of the list, i.e. at relative position 0, known as "rdisk(0)" in the
boot menu. The partition is designated in the boot menu by the
"parition(x)" term, where "x" is the no. of the partition starting
with 1. Take a look at the boot.ini file at position C:\boot.ini,
and you'll see what I'm talking about. By selecting from these
entries in the boot menu at boot time, the boot loader (ntldr)
will pass control to the desired partition's boot sector, and the
partition's OS will be loaded.
Notice that the boot.ini and ntldr don't have to reside on
the same partition as the booted system. Once the clone
has booted for the first time and has settled down as an adult,
EITHER the "parent" OR the clone HD can be put at the head
of the BIOS's boot order and thus get control. The "active"
parition on that HD then receives control and the ntldr there
displays the entries in its boot.ini file. You then select the
proper entry from the menu that is displayed, and ntldr then
loads the system from the partition that you've selected. The
partition you select, though, needn't be on the same partition
as the ntldr/boot.ini or even on the same HD.
To make this simpler, I just have a generic boot.ini file that
lists 4 partitions on 3 HDs. This gets copied whenever I make
a clone. Then, knowing the position of whichever clone I want
to boot up, I just select that position from whatever menu I find
myself looking at - no prior editing necessary.
How do you know which clone you're looking at when it has
booted? You can put a file with a distinctive name on the desktop
of each clone which tells its creation date and the disk/partition it's
in. If you want to see which partition's boot loader is running, you
can put that same info in the boot.ini file of each clone (i.e. between
the double quotes of each entry) and it will be displayed in the
boot menu.
*TimDaniels*
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