PCbanter - View Single Post - Copying Bootable Drive C: to Second Hard drive

**Paul** · March 11th 14, 08:54 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general

wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 22:57:44 -0600, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

wrote:
On Sun, 9 Mar 2014 20:13:09 -0500, "BillW50" wrote:

Actually if the original is booted with the clone drive (even before it
is cloned) it is now marked by the original XP (NT really). Now when you
clone it under the original OS, all of the original information is also
now on the clone, even knowledge of this cloned drive. So it is too late
to disconnect and reboot. The problem is already there. I have seen this
more times than I care to recall. Win98 FDISK's bug is an easy way to
fix it.

--
To let everyone know what happened. After taking a break from working
on this, which was driving me batty, I tried to download Macrium, which
Paul suggested. Being booted and online under Win98, it would not let
me access the thing. I did some sort of work-around on the site, and
faced a 180meg file. Way too big for my dialup connection. (I do
question why a program to simply copy a partition needs to be that big).
It was 42 MB over here, not 180 Meg (and that was very recently). I don't
know which version you were looking at, but it doesn't have to be that big.
Apparently that 180 one includes a whole bunch of other stuff you don't
need.

As for trying to network two PC's using dial-up to allegedly get your XP on
dial-up through the other one, I can't even imagine. :-)

Like I said, it seemed to notice I was using W98 and refused to let me
open it, except for that 180m one. But that dont matter anymore, I
found that XXClone worked great, was easy, and only a 4m download. Its
FREE too. I'd highly recommend it!

Macrium Reflect runs in WinXP or later!

Macrium Reflect, while running in WinXP, can copy
the C: partition while the OS continues to run. It uses VSS
to do that (Volume Shadow Service).

If you attempt to move a partition by: creating a new
partition, copy the files, then you'll need to do a
"fixboot" to load a partition boot sector, and you'll
need to set the boot flag on the partition as well.
If the MBR has no boot code in it (not the same thing
as the PBR), then you need to do "fixmbr" for that to work.
If WinXP was already on the machine, got deleted somehow,
the MBR 440 bytes of code might already be ready to go.
So your XXClone method, either that program has some of
those other details worked out, or you did the other
details manually.

Some backup/copy/clone utilities, don't use VSS, and
then the computer must be rebooted so that the tool can
make its copy. I might have some old version of Ghost
that works that way here. But on WinXP or later, with
VSS, there is a lot less need to reboot, to copy C: somewhere.

Paul