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isolating new clone drive for 1st bootup



 
 
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  #31  
Old February 25th 04, 08:59 AM
Shailesh Humbad
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 09:48 AM
Timothy Daniels
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 11:42 AM
kony
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 02:34 PM
Bob
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 06:18 PM
Timothy Daniels
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"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  
Old February 25th 04, 06:38 PM
Timothy Daniels
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"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  
Old February 25th 04, 08:50 PM
Shailesh Humbad
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 08:58 PM
Shailesh Humbad
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 09:24 PM
Rod Speed
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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  
Old February 25th 04, 09:29 PM
Timothy Daniels
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"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*

 




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