Andrew Wilson said:
Running a system that is Win 7 ready but I installed WinXP on it because I
like it. Have two hard drives. One is system drive i.e regular drive and
the
other I clone from system drive at regular intervals using Acronis True
Image.
If I installed Win 7 on the system drive:
1) Would I be able to boot up the cloned drive with WinXP on it?
Simple answer - no. More complex answer - maybe, but I think you'd have to
change settings in the BIOS (possibly even making the "7" drive invisible)
each time, and then switch them back.
2) If not would I be able to pull documents and programs from it or would
it
be unreadable?
Depends what you're doing with True Image; you say you're cloning. Are you
cloning, or making an image? I think if you're cloning, then yes it should
be readable; if you're making an image, I'm not sure if you'd need
something to look inside the image. (I think an image is one huge file
with everything inside it - a sort of huge .zip file.)
But the two terms image and clone, along with the terms copy, backup, and
a few others, get bandied about so much that nobody is sure what anybody
else means unless they ask probing questions. (It's best to do that - i.
e. ask the questions - though, rather than assume people mean the same as
you do - because many people think they definitely have all the terms
pinned down exactly, but any two such persons are likely to disagree!)
For what it's worth, here are _my_ definitions:
Clone: making a copy, of a disc's contents, onto another disc, which could
be substituted and just work (activation questions notwithstanding) if the
first disc fails.
Image: saving the contents, and structure, of a disc or even several
discs/partitions, into a giant file (which may be split across multiple
volumes if you do it to, say, DVD [or CD if you're really masochistic, let
alone floppies!], rather than another hard drive or big USB stick).
Individual files not accessible without the software that made the images,
and sometimes not even then (i. e. sometimes you can only restore the lot,
depending on the imaging software - that provided free with Windows 7 is I
think of this type).
Backup and copy: just ways of saving data files, though backup sometimes
system files too. Backup _sometimes_ includes some error-recovery
provision. Basically, though, I'd say these two terms - especially backup
(copy I think never had any pretensions) - have lost any useful
definition.
But these are only _my_ definitions (and only currently). Don't rely on
them!