Tim Meddick wrote:
Point taken - we all live and learn......

Yeah, and we all do. :-)

I use CloneMaxx - a DOS-based (or 4dos) program started from a floppy
disk.

Well, at first glance this looked promising, but it's apparently so old it
doesn't support SATA drives, or even USB. Which kills it for me (and I
imagine quite a few others with updated hardware), unfortunately. I think
the older IDE or PATA drives are becoming a bit of history, now. :-)

This copies the entire physical HD from sector 0 to it's end to another
drive of sufficient size (this obviously includes the MBR and DiskID)...

I don't know about the "obviously" part, however. As I explained earlier,
which cloning programs copy which parts of the MBR ... is still up in the
air. They all don't copy the disk-id, as I mentioned. In fact, if I were
taking bets, I'd bet most DON'T copy the disk-id (nor should they, in
principle).

Download the Clone Maxx [free] software (749.78K)
http://download.cnet.com/PC-Inspecto...-10216111.html

==

Cheers, Tim Meddick, Peckham, London. :-)




"John John - MVP" wrote in message
...
What you see returned by the VOL command is the PARTITION ID number, or
the Partition Signature, this is not what Bill is talking about, he is
talking about the DISK Signature.

You can read the disk signature at the registry's
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices DosDevices values or you can get
it with the Diskpart utility... or read in from the MBR with disk editing
or MBR tools like MBRWiz.

The partition signature is made up of the Disk Signature plus additional
numbers. If you have more than one partition on the disk you can look as
the DosDevices values at the MountedDevices key and you will see that all
the partitions on the same disk start with the same signature, the first
four bytes are the disk signature, it will look something like this:

CA A5 F8 A7

The signature is read in reverse order from the DosDevices value, the
above translates to the following disk signatu

A7F8A5CA

John


clipped