Sharon F wrote:
On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 06:50:13 -0400, William B. Lurie wrote:


I think this leads back to my discussions with, and
advice from, Michael Solomon a while back.......

Since 'solving' the problems of creating a drive image
of my master hard drive with Drive Image 7, and creating
a clone of that drive with its PowerQuest Recovery
Environment software, I've been living is a fool's
paradise. I discovered this when I went to create the
monthly Drive Image yesterday, and create the clone on
a newly purchased hard drive.

I've been living with my Master drive booting to a
choice between normal start-up and Recovery Console,
a minor annoyance because after a ten-second countdown
it goes to normal boot, automatically. No problem there.

I believe that the main part of the problem is now that
the new exact clone does not have Master Boot Record
correct, because the 'Normal Boot' path leads to the
choices of Safe Mode or Normal etcetera, and no choice
gets to anything other than a repeat of that set of
choices. If I select Recovery Console, I get a short
DOS-type message saying that file 'xxxxx.dll' is missing,
and to reload it somehow from somewhere. I suspect that
more than one '.dll' file will be in the list of what it
needs. I tried selecting Recovery Console, hoping that I
could somehow do a FIXMBR there, but I can't get to RC.

Incidentally, in running Drive Image, I've repeated the
whole image-and-recreate process, with and without the
'keep the MBR' option, with no apparent difference in
results. I've tried to solve the problem without going to
you experts, but what I've considered all logical paths
haven't solved it.

William B. Lurie


Something about your saga keeps nagging at the back of my mind but I can't
put my finger on it.

When you create an exact image to second drive, the target purpose is to be
able to yank a non-functioning drive and drop the imaged drive into place.
(A restorable image is something different. It's usually compressed and can
be restored to any drive that is large enough to hold the uncompressed
image.)

Have you tried booting with only the imaged drive placed as master on the
main controller? At this point, those recovery console fix it thingies
should be able to help with rebuilding the bootconfig and boot record. Or,
if PM will restore it, give that a try.

Or are you trying to maintain two bootable drives and trying to switch
between two separate XP installations? If this is what you're doing and
XP's boot manager is failing to handle this, you might want to try a third
party boot manager.

I no longer use Drive Image, stopped with Drive Image 6. The newer version
may offer alternatives that I'm not aware of - meaning that the above may
not apply.

For a drive to boot, there are some requirements. There has to be an active
partition, for one. On that partition the boot records and files have to be
available to get past the initial boot strap and let it move on to the
actual loading of the operating system.

I don't know the answer to your problem, William. Just typing some thoughts
"out loud" that may or may not help. It sounds like you're so close to
getting this to work but a step is missing. Just can't put my finger on
which step and since I don't use Drive Image can't give specific advice.


Thank you, Sharon. You speak the truth, of course, and I'll simplify
your thinking by making it clear that when I've spoken about what
I do with the 'cloned' hard drive, I mean that I physically shut
the system down, and pull out the Master, and insert the Clone
exactly in its place, electrically and physically. There should
be no conflict there. BTW, D-I 7 is, I believe, the only version
for XP. The D-I 2002/6 version is expressly not for XP.

Yes, the drive onto which I Recover the Image is Active and Primary.
It is brand new and not even partitioned.

As an aside, and not pertinent here, I have another completely
separate drive with WIN ME on it, and I am able, through a
simple manipulation of the BIOS, to boot to HDD-0 (these XP
alternates) or to HDD-1 (the ME), should I care to go that route.

I think the next step will be for you, or Michael, to instruct me how
to deactivate the RC altogether, after which I will first test my
Master Drive (and pray that it will still work), and then repeat
the D-I Image creation followed by trying to create the clone from it.
W B L
--
William B. Lurie