new XP x64 system disk

Bill Cunningham wrote:
I have tried several things and they don't work. I have 3 partitions.
NTFS, ext2, and fat32. My system is on the ntfs partition. I want to copy my
system to the j: drive and make it bootable so I can copy the system and
boot from it. Whew. I tried safemode it didn't work. I copied boot.ini ntldr
and ntdetect.com to j: and that's not doing it.

Bill

Why not try a backup program that has a cloning capability ?
You could clone over the MBR and the NTFS partition,
all by setting the tick boxes in the tool.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

That's a free tool. The first download step is a "stub installer",
and it downloads a Macrium installer file, and a WinPE PE file.
The PE file is used to make boot materials, such as a rescue CD
for emergency (bare metal) restores.

The copy will run while the OS is still running. You
can copy C:, with the running copy of Reflect in it,
to your other disk drive. After the clone is finished,
the OS will assign a letter to the new cloned drive.

The reason it can copy while the OS is running, is it
uses VSS (volume shadow service). The program also has
a fallback copy method, but it cannot copy C: . If VSS
is damaged, you could copy, say, the FAT32 partition
with the fallback method. But only VSS works to make
snapshots of running OSes.

The VSS on WinXP is a "first edition", isn't persistent
across reboots, and has a limit on the number of shadows
it can handle. But it's still sufficient to make Macrium
work just fine.

The only thing I cannot predict for you, is the impact
of your x64 version, being at SP2. I don't know what
will be missing from your OS in terms of support, as
a result. You are about the only person I know of,
using the x64 version.

Paul

On 03/18/2016 12:40 PM, Bill Cunningham wrote:
I have tried several things and they don't work. I have 3 partitions.
NTFS, ext2, and fat32. My system is on the ntfs partition. I want to copy my
system to the j: drive and make it bootable so I can copy the system and
boot from it. Whew. I tried safemode it didn't work. I copied boot.ini ntldr
and ntdetect.com to j: and that's not doing it.

Bill





Correct.


You can /install/ Windows to a drive other than C:

but your boot files must remain on C:


Note that I said /install/

you cannot simply copy it to another drive as every registry reference
will still be referring to the C: drive

I have tried several things and they don't work. I have 3 partitions.
NTFS, ext2, and fat32. My system is on the ntfs partition. I want to copy my
system to the j: drive and make it bootable so I can copy the system and
boot from it. Whew. I tried safemode it didn't work. I copied boot.ini ntldr
and ntdetect.com to j: and that's not doing it.

Bill

"Paul" wrote in message
...

...

I will give it a try. The thing is I thought I could use bootcfg and scan
the disks and add an entry to boot.ini. ok.

Bill

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Bill Cunningham wrote:
I have tried several things and they don't work. I have 3 partitions.
NTFS, ext2, and fat32. My system is on the ntfs partition. I want to copy
my system to the j: drive and make it bootable so I can copy the system
and boot from it. Whew. I tried safemode it didn't work. I copied
boot.ini ntldr and ntdetect.com to j: and that's not doing it.

Bill

Why not try a backup program that has a cloning capability ?
You could clone over the MBR and the NTFS partition,
all by setting the tick boxes in the tool.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Humm.

That's a free tool. The first download step is a "stub installer",
and it downloads a Macrium installer file, and a WinPE PE file.
The PE file is used to make boot materials, such as a rescue CD
for emergency (bare metal) restores.

The copy will run while the OS is still running. You
can copy C:, with the running copy of Reflect in it,
to your other disk drive. After the clone is finished,
the OS will assign a letter to the new cloned drive.

The reason it can copy while the OS is running, is it
uses VSS (volume shadow service). The program also has
a fallback copy method, but it cannot copy C: . If VSS
is damaged, you could copy, say, the FAT32 partition
with the fallback method. But only VSS works to make
snapshots of running OSes.

The VSS on WinXP is a "first edition", isn't persistent
across reboots, and has a limit on the number of shadows
it can handle. But it's still sufficient to make Macrium
work just fine.

The only thing I cannot predict for you, is the impact
of your x64 version, being at SP2. I don't know what
will be missing from your OS in terms of support, as
a result. You are about the only person I know of,
using the x64 version.

Ok you speak of "cloning" windows. That's not enough. It has to think
it's in the first part of a mbr. Or a certain part or place anyway. Would
this be good or the old robocopy you told me about once. And chaning the
volume ID. Which would be best. If I wanted to copy everything to a 3rd
partition for maintainence on the first partition where it was originally.
The tool you mention here seems to operate. I haven't "used" it yet. But it
fires up and is ready to go.

Bill

Bill Cunningham wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Ok you speak of "cloning" windows. That's not enough. It has to think
it's in the first part of a mbr. Or a certain part or place anyway. Would
this be good or the old robocopy you told me about once. And chaning the
volume ID. Which would be best. If I wanted to copy everything to a 3rd
partition for maintainence on the first partition where it was originally.
The tool you mention here seems to operate. I haven't "used" it yet. But it
fires up and is ready to go.

Bill

"Cloning" means generally, copying exactly something
from the source disk, to a *completely unused* destination
disk. That allows the partition table slot to be preserved
and the boot.ini doesn't need to be edited to have the
path to the boot partition changed.

Macrium is not a Partition Manager. It is first and foremost,
a Backup/Clone tool, interested in keeping copies of stuff.

If you clone an OS like Windows 7 with Macrium, you can
see a few lines in the log window, implying it is editing
the BCD to ensure the cloned (OS) disk will boot. So unlike
Partition Magic, the Reflect program steps over the line,
by doctoring things so they will work. I've seen it for
BCD, but have not witnessed this for a boot.ini .

That suggests to me, it would do the right thing when
handling a WinXP partition. But, I haven't run that test
case, so I don't really know for sure.

*******

I offer my standard advice for backup, clone, partition
management programs, which is...

1) What they're doing is complicated.
2) When you initially get the program, it is untrustworthy.
You build up trust, as tests you carry out succeed.
Have a Plan B, if things go wrong. When I started testing
my first "utility" of this sort, I was backing up with "dd.exe",
which I know works. Clones made with "dd.exe" were my Plan B
in that case.
3) Only after a long long time, do you drop your guard
and use them without a care.

I've had tools bumble simple things like moving
a FAT32 partition to another disk. So don't underestimate
the things they can screw up. I think part of the problem
in some of these failure cases, is the tool not realizing
the partition is corrupted, and the problems seen are a
side effect of the corruption. While you will see tools
do their own sort of CHKDSK before carrying out your command,
there do still seem to be cases where this class of tools
screws up.

I've used Macrium a fair bit to date, and haven't had a
data loss yet, due to a mis-understanding of what it was
going to do. Whereas I did lose 1GB of files in a Robocopy
accident (using /mir). So in terms of track record, Macrium
is a bit ahead at the moment.

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Bill Cunningham wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Ok you speak of "cloning" windows. That's not enough. It has to think
it's in the first part of a mbr. Or a certain part or place anyway.
Would this be good or the old robocopy you told me about once. And
chaning the volume ID. Which would be best. If I wanted to copy
everything to a 3rd partition for maintainence on the first partition
where it was originally. The tool you mention here seems to operate. I
haven't "used" it yet. But it fires up and is ready to go.

Bill

"Cloning" means generally, copying exactly something
from the source disk, to a *completely unused* destination
disk. That allows the partition table slot to be preserved
and the boot.ini doesn't need to be edited to have the
path to the boot partition changed.

Macrium is not a Partition Manager. It is first and foremost,
a Backup/Clone tool, interested in keeping copies of stuff.

If you clone an OS like Windows 7 with Macrium, you can
see a few lines in the log window, implying it is editing
the BCD to ensure the cloned (OS) disk will boot. So unlike
Partition Magic, the Reflect program steps over the line,
by doctoring things so they will work. I've seen it for
BCD, but have not witnessed this for a boot.ini .

That suggests to me, it would do the right thing when
handling a WinXP partition. But, I haven't run that test
case, so I don't really know for sure.

*******

I offer my standard advice for backup, clone, partition
management programs, which is...

1) What they're doing is complicated.
2) When you initially get the program, it is untrustworthy.
You build up trust, as tests you carry out succeed.
Have a Plan B, if things go wrong. When I started testing
my first "utility" of this sort, I was backing up with "dd.exe",
which I know works. Clones made with "dd.exe" were my Plan B
in that case.
3) Only after a long long time, do you drop your guard
and use them without a care.

I've had tools bumble simple things like moving
a FAT32 partition to another disk. So don't underestimate
the things they can screw up. I think part of the problem
in some of these failure cases, is the tool not realizing
the partition is corrupted, and the problems seen are a
side effect of the corruption. While you will see tools
do their own sort of CHKDSK before carrying out your command,
there do still seem to be cases where this class of tools
screws up.

I've used Macrium a fair bit to date, and haven't had a
data loss yet, due to a mis-understanding of what it was
going to do. Whereas I did lose 1GB of files in a Robocopy
accident (using /mir). So in terms of track record, Macrium
is a bit ahead at the moment.

dd.exe is a nice program. Yes I have it in my path too.
c:\WINDOWS\dd.exe and I use it all the time with linux too so I am quite
familiar with it. The thing is that windows seems to like that first
partition. Kind of like the old MSDOS. It wants to be the first partition to
my understanding. Is there a way to copy *ALL* including boot.ini ntldr and
ntdetect.com to the 3rd partition, NTFS and alter the MBR to reflect that
and it Boot? shrug If it can't be done it can't. I want an empty NTFS to
work on. MS makes things so complicated. I appreciate your knowledge and
experience. I had an incident with robocopy too. It wan't quite the version
you use.

Bill