Well, not to spoil your little party, but I have used freeware, beta,
drive cloning software from xxclone.com to copy one drive containing
XP SP1a to a second drive on my computer. I booted off the target
drive without any major problems, even though I didn't disconnect any
drives. I just changed my BIOS to boot of the SCSI instead of the IDE.

There were only a few glitches, but these existed even when the
cloning was done as prescribed by Speed, by disconnecting all other
drives. One little glitch was the bootup presented multiple boot
options for both the source and target drives, but these can easily be
removed using bootcfg or even better, msconfig. The other more major
one was that some user settings and shortcuts got clobbered, and I had
to reinstall or repair a small number of my programs.

kludge, fang, and arse are funny words


Timothy Daniels wrote:
As Rod Speed has pointed out, the clone drive
resulting from a cloning of a WinXP system HD
should be the only drive with an a WinXP OS
on an active partition when booting it up for the
1st time. (Thereafter it can "see" and be "seen"
by another OS in the PC.) The hassle is that you
have to open the case, disconnect the cables to the
other drives, including the one that has just been
cloned, boot up the new clone, and then, usually,
open the case again and reconnect the other drives.

It would be a lot easier if one could just shut down
and then disconnect the other drives by use of a
physical switch to break the connection with their
power cables. That would avoid all the hassle of
opening the case and unplugging the other drives.

So, does anyone have any information that would
indicate if switching the power cables would work?

*TimDaniels*