William B. Lurie said in :
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

Haven't had time to read everything (and still don't) but wanted to
inject a couple of points.

One,

A disk image is a set of files used to restore to the same or other
partition or drive. The disk image fileset is not itself usable to boot
from the partition where that fileset was stored. A *cloned* drive is
completely different. DriveImage will do both. You can have it create
a fileset containing a logical description of the physical definition of
a partition, or you can have it clone a drive (via "Copy Drives"
function).

A cloned disk can be swapped in for the source drive to look and behave
just like the source drive as long as you connect it the same way (as
you mention by moving it to the same port in the same physical scan
order). To a degree, a cloned drive is something like a one-shot
mirrored drive: the target disk is an exact copy of the source disk but
only at the time the target disk got cloned. A disk image fileset
cannot be used by itself to bring up a system but instead requires
running the imaging program to restore that image.

Two,

As far as the boot menu asking whether to select Windows XP or Recovery
Console, that has nothing to do with the boot sequence for starting the
operating system. The BIOS loads the bootstrap program from the first
460 bytes of sector 0 (MBR) of the first physically scanned hard disk
which then runs and loads the boot sector of the primary partition
marked as active which then starts the load of the operating system
which then reads (in the case of NT-based Windows) boot.ini to see which
parallel installed operating system to load, Windows XP or the Recovery
Console. The OS has already loaded its initial loader program and is
running and the boot process (from BIOS and hardware) is over.

You could uninstall the Recovery Console if you don't want to get the
menu to choose. Or you could shorten the menu timer to expire quicker.
Or you could edit boot.ini to remove the entry defining where to find
the Recovery Console interface (but that won't eliminate the Recovery
Console's files).

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