XP boot fails after copy of identical clone

[Anne Onime]

I have a dual-boot disk, with 2 partitions. Then I clone it
to another identical disk (same model, same firmware).
Clone boots fine either of the 2 Windows. Now as an
educational exercise experiment, I copied the first partition
of the original disk to the clone using ROBOCOPY. I did this
after booting the second partion, so the first partion
system files aren't in use. According to the robocopy logs,
and a comparison of the two disks, it seems to have copied
everything except robocopy.exe itself. Now if I boot the
Windows XP in first partition, it freezes at the "welcome"
screen. Why? Everything should be the same, except perhaps
the serial number of the disk buried somewhere in the
registry?
I did the robocopy immediately after seeing if the clone
would boot, nothing was deleted or added, all automatic
updates were disabled so nothing might be altered behind
the scenes.

 

[Tester]

Anne,

You can't clone an XP system using RoboCopy because it is not capable of
copying the hidden systems files. At least I haven't come across
anybody who has used this successfully.

To clone a system, you need to use either Acronis True Image or Norton
Ghost (both available from their respective website as trials). there
are others that are free for personal use and I am sure somebody will
give you the links to those.

Hope this will solve your problem and save you from wasting any more
time on this futile exercise.

Good luck.

 

[Hot-Text]

Anne Onime
Can you Give us the name of the Hard Drives?
And we give you a link to the Hard Drives Website,
So you can get the right software to Copy HDD to HDD!

 

[Paul]

Anne,

You can't clone an XP system using RoboCopy because it is not capable of
copying the hidden systems files. At least I haven't come across
anybody who has used this successfully.

To clone a system, you need to use either Acronis True Image or Norton
Ghost (both available from their respective website as trials). there
are others that are free for personal use and I am sure somebody will
give you the links to those.

Hope this will solve your problem and save you from wasting any more
time on this futile exercise.

Good luck.

You can use RoboCopy to copy WinXP. I've done it three times now.

The secret, is booting a second Windows OS, so you can do
maintenance on the first.

I have two disks. One has WinXP. One has Win2K. I boot the Win2K
disk, if I want to Robocopy WinXP. If I do it that way, all the
files can be copied (because WinXP isn't running, the pagefile
isn't busy and so on).

(Note - these commands are deadly, if you make a mistake! Ask me
how I know :-( I use the XP026 version of Robocopy. The partition
is F: in this case, because that's how Win2K enumerates them.
I: is my "temporary storage" partition.)

robocopy F:\ I:\ /mir /copy:datso /dcopy:t /r:3 /w:2 /zb /np /tee /v /log:robocopy_f_to_i.log

What Robocopy cannot copy, is the partition boot sectors.
If I didn't reformat the WinXP partition, then the partition boot
sectors would remain valid. But since I typically reformat the
WinXP partition, before putting the files back, that wipes them
out. I can put them back later, with "fixboot".

The OS I've done this on, is the one I'm typing on right now.

If you can't afford to have a copy of Win2K on your computer,
you might try a Windows 7 recovery CD and the "command prompt"
option. I can't promise Robocopy would run there, but it's worth
an experiment if you have the time. You can either get a CD
like that, using the neosmart (torrent) links, or your personal copy
of Windows 7 will burn one for you (using its IMAPI2 support). I
was surprised to find my new laptop, with Windows 7 on it,
has that function built-in, so I don't need to use the
Neosmart one.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2009/windows-7-system-repair-discs/

Paul

 

[Tester]

How long did it take you to do all this?

 

[Paul]

How long did it take you to do all this?

It might take an hour total. Copy over, format, copy back,
about 20 minutes for each copy operation, plus time for
bookkeeping (updating my log file etc.). In this example from
the end of a log file, it achieves copying at 47MB/sec.

Total Copied Skipped Mismatch FAILED Extras
Dirs : 13240 13239 1 0 0 0
Files : 165722 165720 2 0 0 0
Bytes : 37.622 g 33.623 g 3.999 g 0 0 0
Times : 0:17:04 0:12:36 0:00:00 0:04:27

Speed : 47692904 Bytes/sec.
Speed : 2729.009 MegaBytes/min.

The "skipped files" are pagefile and hiberfil, which I copy
separately ahead of issuing the final Robocopy command. That
puts those files at the beginning of the partition. Then, Robocopy
doesn't get to copy them, and they're skipped as they're already
present.

HTH,
Paul

 

[Tester]

It might take an hour total. Copy over, format, copy back,
about 20 minutes for each copy operation, plus time for
bookkeeping (updating my log file etc.). In this example from
the end of a log file, it achieves copying at 47MB/sec.

Although your timings are dubious but do you think it is worth it to
spend an "hour total" when somebody's charge out rate is £60 per hour?

I wonder what is the cost of Acronis TH or Norton Ghost from Amazon?

 

[Paul]

Although your timings are dubious but do you think it is worth it to
spend an "hour total" when somebody's charge out rate is £60 per hour?

I wonder what is the cost of Acronis TH or Norton Ghost from Amazon?

That's on my machine, not someone else's.

The objective in this case, is a zero cost software solution,
using things I already own. I have the WinXP and Win2K already
(sunk cost), and Robocopy was free. I didn't go out and
buy an extra OS, I already had it here.

I also do backups using "dd". Anytime a dangerous experiment
is in progress, a backup with "dd" is the first step. And
that's a port of "dd" to Windows, and it's freeware. And
if it wasn't, I could always do it from Linux.

There are other ways to do copies for free, such as the
version of Acronis on the Seagate site, provided by Seagate
for transferring files onto a new Seagate disk. So that's
another way you can get the software. One of the other
disk companies has something like that available as well.

There might be more efficient ways to do copies or backups,
but I like methods that are easy to understand. And not all
the commercial tools, meet that objective. For example,
any tool that offers to "schedule" things for you, usually
ends up being a dead loss (backup fails, user has to figure
out why, then try again). It's not really a fault of the
software, as much as it's a fault of the OS and the ease
of getting tasks to execute at a later date, and with
proper credentials.

Paul