George said:
I have used xxclone to clone one internal hard drive
to another and the cloned drive worked fine.
Did it "work fine" in isolation from the cloned drive?
When the clone is booted up for the 1st time with
the original drive still visible, some of its pointers
get set to point back to the original drive, and it
isn't apparent until the original drive is disconnected.
I then cloned a Maxor Usb drive from one internal drive
and then used the usb drive to clone another internal
hard drive. The newly cloned drive did not boot properly!
Any ideas?
The answer may lie in the answer to my 1st question.
Otherwise, the master boot record may not have been
copied from the USB external drive to the ATA internal
drive.
p.s. I would prefer using the usb approach because I can
shut it off when not cloning it, thereby saving it from
mechanical failure!
If you have an extra 5 1/2 inch bay, you could have the
best of both worlds by installing a rack for a removable
hard drive. I use the Kingwin removable tray that has
a fan built into the bottom of the tray. That arrangement
seems to cool quite well by drawing air around the
drive before expelling back into the center of the case.
Here is a link:
http://www.kingwin.com/pdut_detail.asp?LineID=&CateID=35&ID=95
You can buy the rack and the tray for around $27 and
extra trays for about $14 if you google around. If you find
that your IDE cable isn't long enough to reach the rack
for the removable drive or that it blocks air movement,
use "round" cables. They come in various lengths and
in single and dual device forms. I use the ones with the
clear sheath and the braided aluminum shield - looks like
automotive racing steel braid hose. I got them from
http://www.svcompucycle.com/cables-ata-100-133-round-cables.html .
With a removable IDE hard drive, you can use huge drives
that are getting really cheap now, and you can have the speed
of an IDE channel to do the copying. Plus, you can have the
drive powered up just during the copy operation and powered
down or completely removed during normal operation - just as
with USB external drives except for the USB's hot-swappability.
The downside? You will be operating in an area not covered
by the ATA specifications (which specify 18" ribbon cables and
no intermediary connectors such as on the back of the removable
tray's rack). But many people and educational computer labs
operate with revovable ATA hard drives, and I can say that I
(for one) have encountered no problems (that I *know* of).
*TimDaniels*
