PS How to clone Windows XP back to your HD?
On Apr 29, 3:01*pm, John John - MVP wrote:
Carl wrote:
On Apr 29, 9:44 am, John John - MVP wrote:
Carl wrote:
On Apr 28, 1:20 pm, "Twayne" wrote:
PS re the Subject line: You do not "clone" XP to a drive. A "clone" IS a
hard drive that contains the operating system. What you do is replace a bad
drive with a "cloned" drive, and in theory it will start right up.
* *Your problem could be in your understanding of what you're trying to
achieve. Whatever it is, it is not "cloning ... back to your HD".
HTH,
Thanks for weighing in, Twayne -
You are right; I used the wrong terminology.
One of the big surprises and disappointments of my introduction to
Microsoft Windows was to learn that, after making a clone of your HD,
if you have trouble, such as I am now having, that you could NOT copy
back the clone of your HD to your internal HD.
Macintosh allows this and instead of backing up each week, I use
SuperDuper to clone my OS to an external HD. *Haven't had to copy that
clone back to my internal HD since Apple came out with OSX, but I did
have to do so once or twice under OS 9 and its predecessors.
What do you mean "you could NOT copy back the clone of your HD to your
internal HD". *We create clones and images all the time here and restore
them back anytime without any problems. *Of course, Windows PCs are much
more varied than Macs, PCs come in a mutltitude of hardware
configurations so moving clones or restoring images to different
computers is not generally supported, whereas a Mac is a Mac is a Mac,
so moving a clone or restoring an image to another Mac might not be a
problem.
John
John -
Lest my misuse of terminology confuses the situation, let me explain.
What I should have said was I was told, that for licensing reasons, M/
S will not allow you to boot your machine from Windows on an external
USB hard drive.
I have a Seagate external HD.
I used Seagate's free software to clone my Netbook's HD to an external
USB HD.
If I connect that USB HD, boot up, change the Boot Device Priority to
list that USB HD first, then exit and save the configuration, I get
nothing but a blinking white cursor on a black screen.
The first time this happened, I asked on this forum, I believe, and
was told that what I was doing was not possible because M/S did not
allow you to boot from an external HD.
I just tried it, and I am looking at the blinking cursor.
Was I misinformed?
This has nothing to do with Microsoft's licensing, it' a technical
limitation of the Windows operating system. *What happens with Windows
is that the USB stack is initialized well after the Windows session
manager has started, so in essence Windows can't boot off a USB drive
because Windows has to initialize the stack before it can use it, a
catch 22 kind of situation. *If you search the internet you will find
information on how some have hacked the stack drivers to make them boot
devices which in turn allows the ntldr boot manager to load the stack
before the session manager is started. *This is unsupported by
Microsoft, they have never bothered rewriting the boot up routine to
have ntldr load the stack so Windows can't boot off a USB drive.
John
BTW, shame on Microsoft for not bothering to rewri
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