Un-expected Bonus with HDD failure

[Mike G]

Winxp system with 2 SATA HDD, one is OS the other is DATA. I have a
removable HDD attached via one of my IDE channels which I turn on and off
when I do backups. My main SATA HDD started having failures and I decided
to use CasperXP to do a copy of my sytem to this removable HDD. When I did
a reboot after the copy, I noticed the machine booted to the removable HDD
and worked perfectly without any hassels. (I sure like CasperXP for that.)
When I turn off the removable HDD, the sytem boots normally to the SATA
drive. I was able to use the removable HDD and CAsper to format and copy
system to new SATA drive. Could not be any easier. Bonus is that I can
boot normally to the SATA Drive or the removable HDD be it another copy of
my system or Vista or what ever!

 

[smlunatick]

YES! This is a "known" bonus! The IDE, eSATA and SCSI
controllers/channels are all considered as "internal" connections. XP
can only boot from Internal connections.

 

[Anna]

Winxp system with 2 SATA HDD, one is OS the other is DATA. I have a
removable HDD attached via one of my IDE channels which I turn on and off
when I do backups. My main SATA HDD started having failures and I decided
to use CasperXP to do a copy of my sytem to this removable HDD. When I
did a reboot after the copy, I noticed the machine booted to the removable
HDD and worked perfectly without any hassels. (I sure like CasperXP for
that.) When I turn off the removable HDD, the sytem boots normally to the
SATA drive. I was able to use the removable HDD and CAsper to format and
copy system to new SATA drive. Could not be any easier. Bonus is that I
can boot normally to the SATA Drive or the removable HDD be it another
copy of my system or Vista or what ever!

Mike:
You were more fortunate than you think...

Presumably the system boots to your removable PATA HDD (in its mobile rack),
i.e., the destination drive in the disk cloning operation rather than the
SATA HDD - the source disk - because your BIOS boot priority order indicates
that the IDE drive occupies a higher order of priority than the SATA HDD.
When the PATA removable HDD is disconnected then the system will boot to the
next bootable device in the boot priority order. At least I think that is
what's happening in your situation.

The reason I say you were more fortunate than you think is because it's
generally good practice that immediately following the disk cloning
operation to disconnect the source HDD and make that initial boot *only*
with the destination HDD connected. In many (but not all) cases when both
drives are connected following the disk cloning operation and the system
boots to the source drive, there will be subsequent boot problems with the
destination drive in that the system will assign a drive letter to the
destination drive other than C:. In that scenario the destination HDD will
not be bootable if it is the *only* HDD connected during bootup. The system
*will* boot to that destination HDD as long as the source HDD is connected
at the time of bootup. And in that case there is no practical way that I'm
aware of to change the drive letter of the destination HDD from whatever it
is to C:.

Again, I emphasize that this situation does not *always* occur. In a
significant number of cases no subsequent boot problems will arise affecting
the destination HDD when both the source & destination drives are connected
during the initial boot following the disk cloning operation. But it's
something for the user to be aware of.
Anna

 

[Mike G]

In my case, I watched the drive letter assignments, thus confirming what was
happening. Normal SATA config, the os=C:, the DATA disk= D: and I manually
assigned drive N: to the mobile rack. However when I boot up with the
mobile rack powered, it assumed the C:, Data was still B: and the sata drive
(previously C assumed the N: drive letter. When I installed the new
drive, I manually partitioned it, formated it (using CASPERXP)and assigned
it to N:, copied over the OS from the mobile rack (IDE), shut down the
mobile rack and rebooted. The new SATA drive took C: again being Drive 0
and returned to normal. In my bios selection for booting sequence, it has
remained at HDD, CDROM, Floppy, as far as I can determine, is an IDE
sequence.

 

[Mike G]

As an added note, even though I do no like to do this, I can power up my
mobile rack after the system is up and running from the SATA drive, and the
mobile rack still assumes drive N: