If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#31
|
|||
|
|||
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* |
#32
|
|||
|
|||
Here, again, folksies, is my intended system:
Two or more HDs are mounted in removable trays. Periodically, I copy a clone file to one of several partitions on each of them, keeping a running archive of about 8 weekly backups of the entire primary HD. These removable HDs are ATA/133 HDs and they're both faster and cheaper than USB2 or FireWire external HDs. Copies go faster, so I'm more likely to backup often, and being cheaper, I could afford to buy even another HD and removable tray to mount it in, thus extending my archive's temporal span. A clone HD is inside my PC, containing a bootable clone of the primary HD, for immediate use if the primary HD should fail. I haven't yet installed the removable HD components, but I do have a clone HD constantly running in my PC, and I remake the clone once a week, alternating between 3 extra HDs that I have so as to have time-series snapshots of my primary HD going back through 3 backup points. An objection repeatedly raised is that this is a "kludge". So what? If it works, who cares if it isn't to "specs"? Another objection is that the failure of the primary HD is such an unlikely event that it doesn't deserve making bootable clones. That presupposes that the time to copy a clone file from an archive medium to a spare HD that one manually substitutes for the failed HD is irrelevant. Here's the scenario: I do stock trading in the morning hours. At any time, a hard drive failure could be catastrophic if I couldn't recover in a couple minutes. At one time I had dialup, DSL and cable internet service, and there were times that I was thankful for the redundancy. Now I just have dialup and cable (through 2 ISPs), but being prepared has saved me a bundle a couple times, and it's worth the effort. I also do software development during the rest of the day for university courses I take. I like to have separate one or two HDs for that purpose. I'd like nothing better to be able to switch between HDs without having to open the case, etc., and without having to run all the HDs all the time. Thus - the desire to have power switches to prevent unused HDs from being powered up as well as to assist in isolation when booting up clone HDs for the first time. A device toward that purpose might be the Romtec Trios II, which would have the advantage over manual switches by preventing a change in power to a hard drive if the PC is running. The down- side is that it takes up the space of 2 PCI cards. The upside - it flouts the specs, of course! :-) And.... it's mindlessly simple. *TimDaniels* |
#33
|
|||
|
|||
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 20:36:19 -0800, "Timothy Daniels"
wrote: And then what, isolate the resulting bootable image for its first boot up? Then open the case again and reconnect the HDs and reboot? Why not have all that already done? I want the switchover to be as simple and quick as possible. My current practices promise that. All I want to do is to simplify the HD cloning in preparation for a inoportune primary HD failure. Assuming you haven't riveted the case shut, going to this stage of pre-planning may be excessive. Primary HD failure isn't THAT common, the amount of time spent implementing this is certainly far greater than that of swapping drives around. If immediate uptime is really that important then you should consider RAID 1. Please understand that I didn't start this thread to ask for advice. I simply asked about the effects having of an unpowered device connected to an IDE cable. *TimDaniels* After you've made a backup image as others have suggested, you can test that on your specific equipment, easily enough. |
#34
|
|||
|
|||
I will soon be using Drive Image to clone the hard drive that my XP SP1A (NTFS) system boots from, on to a new drive. I also have other hard drives in my system used as data storage (non-bootable). I've cloned lots of boot drives before, but this will be my first one under XP SP1A. My past practice had me always swapping both the power and IDE cables from the source (the drive I just cloned) drive over to the new drive after the clone finished and before the first boot of the new drive. Question: Is this practice still OK? I've been trying to follow this thread, but it's gotten pretty diverse and hard to follow, but I thought I'd try and get a straight-forward answer to help me in my upcoming situation. Thanks, Bob |
#35
|
|||
|
|||
"Bob" wrote: I will soon be using Drive Image to clone the hard drive that my XP SP1A (NTFS) system boots from, on to a new drive. I also have other hard drives in my system used as data storage (non-bootable). I've cloned lots of boot drives before, but this will be my first one under XP SP1A. My past practice had me always swapping both the power and IDE cables from the source (the drive I just cloned) drive over to the new drive after the clone finished and before the first boot of the new drive. Question: Is this practice still OK? Yes, that's still OK, but for some purposes, overkill. I just disconnect the source drive and leave the destination drive (the clone) still connected as it is. The reason is that I will have to reconnect the clone drive for normal use, anyway. I also have the 2 HDs on separate channels. My question was twofold: If they were on the same channel, would just disconnecting the source's power cable (leaving the data cable connected) be OK? Since there are a lot of configurations for this latter situation (different drive speeds, different positions for Master and Slave, Cable Select vs. Master/Slave, PCI card IDE channels vs. motherboard IDE channels, etc.), I thought I'd plumb the minds of the usual newsgroup suspects. It looks, though, that I'll have to do my own experimenting, and the results will apply only to my own particular setup and equipment. *TimDaniels* |
#36
|
|||
|
|||
"Shailesh Humbad" wrote:
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. Your SCSI hard drive was the clone HD, then, and you changed your BIOS' boot sequence (i.e. its hard drive booting priority list) before boot-loading from your new clone HD? 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. Was this "multiple boot options" an option presented just before the operating system was loaded which gave you a choice of which copy of the OS (i.e. which HD) to boot? Was the solution to just edit the boot.ini file by turning the unwanted option into a comment by putting square brackets around its entry in the file? If so, this is a familiar problem, solved, as I recall, by shutting down immediately after the cloning operation is complete. 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. Not good to hear. I had higher expectations for xxClone. How easy was the utility to understand and to use? kludge, fang, and arse are funny words "Kludge" is an Americanism as far as I know. It was around in the late 50s/early 60s. "Fang" may be an Ozzyism, "arse" is a Brit word. Our beloved Rod Speed seems to post from Western Australia. *TimDaniels* |
#37
|
|||
|
|||
Your SCSI hard drive was the clone HD, then, and you
changed your BIOS' boot sequence (i.e. its hard drive booting priority list) before boot-loading from your new clone HD? Yes. The SCSI device is actually the Sil3112 on-board SATA RAID controller. I cloned from an IDE drive to the SATA RAID drive. After that completed, I shut down WinXP, reboot, and set the BIOS to boot from SCSI before IDE. I can leave it as-is and continue booting from IDE of course, but I wanted to switch my system drive to the RAID. It's a little freaky to boot up and see the exact same thing, so I went to Disk Management in System Management to verify I was booting from the drive I intended. xxclone has a new feature to change the desktop background image on the target drive, but I've never tried it. Was this "multiple boot options" an option presented just before the operating system was loaded which gave you a choice of which copy of the OS (i.e. which HD) to boot? Was the solution to just edit the boot.ini file by turning the unwanted option into a comment by putting square brackets around its entry in the file? If so, this is a familiar problem, solved, as I recall, by shutting down immediately after the cloning operation is complete. Yep. I looked at the boot.ini from a text editor, msconfig, and bootcfg. I didn't want to mess it up, so I used msconfig. In the General tab, I selected "Selective startup" and "Use Original boot.ini". Without rebooting, I set it back to "Regular startup" and looked at the Boot.ini tab. This seemed to reset the boot.ini to default, and then I rebooted and the OS choice options were gone. A couple other times I used xxclone, this glitch did not happen, but I was not able to pin down why. It is probably what you say. Not good to hear. I had higher expectations for xxClone. How easy was the utility to understand and to use? Well, reinstalling and repairing a few programs is far better than reinstalling all of Windows and all your applications, or using stupid WinXP backup and restore, which requires you to reinstall an exactly matching version of WinXP before doing a restore. XXclone is also beta software, so some glitches are to be expected. The program is very simple to use, it just has one screen, and you just choose the source drive, target drive, and clone method, and click Start. Shailesh |
#38
|
|||
|
|||
After cloning, Quicken 2003 wouldn't open my quicken data file, so per
the Intuit support website suggestion, I had to reinstall it. Office XP asked for the install CD to repair some shortcuts. Some shortcuts in my start menu lost their icons, and I had to delete and recreate them. ATI control panel asked me to register again. Other than that, all the other files, settings, and programs were intact. Shailesh |
#39
|
|||
|
|||
Timothy Daniels wrote in message ... Here, again, folksies, is my intended system: Two or more HDs are mounted in removable trays. And you will find that thats a kludge that sometimes works and often doesnt with modern high performance systems. Periodically, I copy a clone file to one of several partitions on each of them, keeping a running archive of about 8 weekly backups of the entire primary HD. These removable HDs are ATA/133 HDs and they're both faster and cheaper than USB2 or FireWire external HDs. Many kludges are cheaper because they are a kludge. Copies go faster, so I'm more likely to backup often, Only a fool sits there twiddling his thumbs while backups are being done. Anyone with any sense automates the backups so if they take a little longer its a complete yawn. And the speed difference with image file creation is small anyway. and being cheaper, I could afford to buy even another HD and removable tray to mount it in, thus extending my archive's temporal span. Makes much more sense to use something a lot more modern like V2i Protector that does incremental image backups, automated. A clone HD is inside my PC, containing a bootable clone of the primary HD, for immediate use if the primary HD should fail. Which by definition is a rare event, so if you have to open the case to swap the drive thats no big deal time wise. You have to open the case to get the dead one out anyway. I haven't yet installed the removable HD components, And so havent YET been fanged on the arse by the collosal kludge those are with modern high performance systems. Bet you wont have the balls to mention the problems you get. but I do have a clone HD constantly running in my PC, and I remake the clone once a week, alternating between 3 extra HDs that I have so as to have time-series snapshots of my primary HD going back through 3 backup points. That description is so confused that it isnt at all clear just what you are doing. Is the clone in the PC or are the clones on removable drive trays ? And if you have weekly clones, what is the point of the other image backups mentioned at the top ? An objection repeatedly raised is that this is a "kludge". So what? If it works, who cares if it isn't to "specs"? And WHEN it doesnt work reliably because you're using a collosal kludge that flouts the specs in a number of areas, you've ****ed FAR more time against the wall as a result of that kludge than you will ever save in the unlikely event that the boot drive fails and you need to open the case to replace that drive and restore from an image file thats on an external drive. Another objection is that the failure of the primary HD is such an unlikely event that it doesn't deserve making bootable clones. That the small reduction in time to a usable system in the unlikely event of a boot drive failure isnt worth worrying about because its by definition a rare event. What matters is the MUCH greater amount of time wasted by farting around with removable drive bays and your long winded manual approach to backup. Makes a hell of a lot more sense to use a hardware approach which allows completely automatic backups with at most a quick unplugging of an external drive so you can have the backup drive physically separated from the PC its backing up so you dont lose anything if the place burns down or the place is looted by a druggy etc. In other words the only physical action required is to physically separate the backup drive from the PC and that isnt involved in the backup process at all. That presupposes that the time to copy a clone file from an archive medium to a spare HD that one manually substitutes for the failed HD is irrelevant. Nope, just that the small DIFFERENCE in time to handle a failed boot drive is irrelevant. You have to open the case to get the dead drive out to RMA or replace it anyway. Here's the scenario: I do stock trading in the morning hours. At any time, a hard drive failure could be catastrophic if I couldn't recover in a couple minutes. Then you should be using RAID1 instead and then there wont be any downtime at all and you can remove the failed drive once the market is closed. If you keep manually cloning the boot drive and manually turning the power to the clone off for the first boot after the clone has been done, you can guarantee that the one time you do need to boot off the clone, that you have forgotten to turn the power off the clone for the first boot after the clone and that you cant actually boot off the clone at all when the original boot drive fails. At one time I had dialup, DSL and cable internet service, and there were times that I was thankful for the redundancy. Now I just have dialup and cable (through 2 ISPs), but being prepared has saved me a bundle a couple times, and it's worth the effort. Irrelevant to how to handle a boot drive failure. And if you need real redundancy, its stupid to be relying on just one PC anyway. The only thing that makes any sense is more than one PC. I also do software development during the rest of the day for university courses I take. I like to have separate one or two HDs for that purpose. Gets sillier by the minute. No need for separate HDs for that. I'd like nothing better to be able to switch between HDs without having to open the case, etc., You can do that with a decent boot manager. and without having to run all the HDs all the time. Mindlessly silly. Pointless using a collosal kludge for such a superficial reason. Because that WILL fang you on the arse. Thus - the desire to have power switches to prevent unused HDs from being powered up as well as to assist in isolation when booting up clone HDs for the first time. You're obviously just another stupid know it all kid thats so stupid that it has to get fanged on the arse before it eventually dawns on it that there is a reason for formal specs. Hopefully that will be a very expensive lesson for you. A device toward that purpose might be the Romtec Trios II, which would have the advantage over manual switches by preventing a change in power to a hard drive if the PC is running. If you do want to go this stupid route, the only viable approach is to use SATA drives that are speced for hot swap. At a price. Your trading must be hopeless if you cant even afford external drives. The down-side is that it takes up the space of 2 PCI cards. The upside - it flouts the specs, of course! :-) And.... it's mindlessly simple. You'll go blind if you dont watch out, child. |
#40
|
|||
|
|||
"Shailesh Humbad" commented on xxClone beta: After cloning, Quicken 2003 wouldn't open my quicken data file, so per the Intuit support website suggestion, I had to reinstall it. Office XP asked for the install CD to repair some shortcuts. Some shortcuts in my start menu lost their icons, and I had to delete and recreate them. ATI control panel asked me to register again. Other than that, all the other files, settings, and programs were intact. Thanks for the elaboration on xxClone. I hope you reported the problems to xxClone so they could squash those bugs. What version were you using? *TimDaniels* |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Mysterious Hard Drive Problem | Bill Anderson | General | 4 | January 18th 04 04:43 AM |
Multi-boot Windows XP without special software | Timothy Daniels | General | 11 | December 12th 03 06:38 AM |
help with motherboard choice | S.Boardman | General | 30 | October 20th 03 10:23 PM |
Help! WinXP can't tell that my 2nd hard drive is already formatted | FitPhillyGuy | General | 12 | September 26th 03 03:38 AM |
Seagate Hard Drive - Faulty? | Mike Walker | General | 2 | September 5th 03 02:06 AM |