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[dayrelton]

Had a tech-house do full check of 7 year old laptop because of excessive heat

Replaced SATA 80G [failing] with SATA 160G in Dell Inspiron 9300

Tech-house created one partition and only installed XP-SP3 and my 'data' - no xfer of registry or installed software

Thus they did not clone my 80G [42G in use]

I put my 80G in USB caddy - came up as E drive [CD/DVD is assigned D]

Used easeUS Disk Manager to reduce partition on 160G to 60G so as not to lose operating system created by tech-house

Used Run/compmgmt.msc/Disk Management to create 100G partition on 160G drive [sizes approximate]

Formatted new 100G partition [destination where clone will be deposited] and assigned it drive F

Ran NG Disk Copy E to F [make 'active', no MBR] - after 1hr and 4 progress bars, said "not enough disk space for image file"

Looked at 100G partition and its drive letter was gone and was no longer formatted

I reassigned drive letter F and left it unformatted this time

Ran NG Disk Copy - success after 3hrs and 58mins.

Looked at 100G partition and 'in use' matched and destination marked as 'Active' - looked good

Turned computer off and cold started - it booted

Let it sit there a while as there was disk activity which turned out to be system updates [was out of commission for 3 weeks]

Selected 'restart' after updates were done - it booted ok

I said it required another restart and it booted ok again

Did some checking out of MS-Office and other installed software - all worked

Turned the computer off in hibernation - then had a few beers

Next morning - would not boot - just dark screen with flashing underscore in upper left

Put old 80G back in and booted - ok [and it did system updates]

Put new 160G in caddy and changed tech-house partition to 'active' on 160G disk

Put new 160G back in and booted - ok

Booted from NG15 CD to see if I could do anything - it ran 'chkdsk' on the cloned partition

- no errors but said it recovered some unallocated space and added to free space

Put 80G back in and got same dark screen and blinking underscore.

So what happened?

I am going to start with an unformatted destination [F] partition again

But I am going to make sure original disk gets all system updates, a 'chkdsk' and possibly a defrag.

First I will wait a day or so for responses - thanks.

[Brian_K]

dayrelto,

These are the HD alternatives...

unallocated space (partition is not present)

partition, not formatted, no drive letter

partition, formatted, no drive letter

partition, not formatted, with drive letter

partition, formatted, with drive letter

For Copy Drive the formatting is irrelevant. It is the drive letter that matters. You must have no drive letter for the Copy Drive destination and the choice we recommend is unallocated space. However you already have WinXP on the new HD and when you clone a new WinXP to that HD the new WinXP will not boot with the C: drive letter and you will have all sorts of problems. You will have a schizophrenic system. What are your plans now?

[dayrelton]

Brian,

Logical drive letters are assigned at boot time and what they are in the partition table is irrelevant.  Right?

[stick three cloned drives in a computer all with one partition table labelled C and the one booted gets C.

The other two E and F based on how they are encountered - disk bus first then USB last for example.

All could even be marked as active, but as they are on separate physical drives, only the first 'seen' by the bios gets the boot.]

When I set things up, XP assigned logical drive letters as follows with 160G disk in laptop

C - the one the tech-house setup [booted device] also where NG15 is installed

D - the CD/DVD

E - my original 80G drive in the USB caddy

then

F - assigned by me on the 160G in laptop [after boot]

NG15 copy was E to F and F was set active as requested, no new MBR as it would clobber tech-house partition

With caddy still attached the first boot of the clone yielded:

C - is the destination F [booted device] on 160G

D - is the CD/DVD

E - is the C that the tech-house setup on 160G

F - is my original 80G drive

As each operating system is separate in their own partitions,

even if C and E both have XP SP3 there should never be any conflict.

[provided you do not move files between them and always run programs off C]

When I set the tech-house partition as active it boots every time.

The clone did boot - three times and only barfed when I selected a hibernate shutdown as it has failed to boot thereafter.

I have defragged the source and will try again - F drive letter and unformatted - since F and formatted failed with image file error.

Since the chkdsk collected something as unallocated, perhaps that is the problem - it is eliminated now as a suspect.

Will run in the morning EDT.

Thanks

[Brian_K]

---

dayrelton wrote:

The clone did boot - three times

---

But the OS running was probably the recently installed OS in the 60 GB partiition. Schizophrenic system.

The OS in the 60 GB partition will be C: drive when it is booted and also C: drive when the second partition is made active and booted. The second partition will never be C: drive. If you deleted the first partition the OS in the second partition would not load into Windows. See...

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/HELP-Cloned-HDD-to-SSD-w-Ghost-15-0-Windows-7-i...

[DaveH]

---

dayrelton wrote:

Logical drive letters are assigned at boot time and what they are in the partition table is irrelevant.  Right?

[stick three cloned drives in a computer all with one partition table labelled C and the one booted gets C.

The other two E and F based on how they are encountered - disk bus first then USB last for example.

---

Not really.  Although that was correct with DOS through windows 98.

XP and later uses partition signatures to distinguish what drive has each letter.

You can verify that by changing cable connections so the drives get enumerated in a different order, the drive letters will still remain the same.

Starting with vista\win7 the system uses disk signatures instead of a boot.ini to boot, but the letters for each partition were always set by partition signatures.

Thats where the problem comes in when cloning a drive to another partition that already has a signature and drive letter.

For instance, lets say you have a source drive and a destination drive that already has a partition with a drive letter.

Source drive has partition signature aaaa and destination drive has signature bbbb

The "mounted devices" registry entry already says "drive aaaa shall be letter C"

Windows on the source drive "see's" the destination partition and if it is assigned a letter the registry entry under mounted devices will now also say "drive bbb shall be letter F"

Everything is fine and the system works at this point with windows on C and the destination drive as F.

But when you do a "copy drive"  the source operating system and of course the registry get copied to the destination drive.

You put that "cloned" drive in the system all by it'self and it does not boot properly.

Because the registry says drive aaa will be the C drive and that drive is no longer present.  The drive in the system still has the bbbb signature so windows assigns it the letter F just like it always did and all of a sudden everything is screwed up.

Keeping that in mind, yes you can put together a system with 2 versions of XP and make it into a dual boot that will not conflict and not be "Schizophrenic", but you have to make sure that each version of windows has the drive signature it is installed on set as the C drive and the partition signature for the "other" version of XP has to be another letter (like D).

Then no matter what version of XP you boot into the OS is always C and the partition for the other XP is always D.

Dave

Edit- had to change a few places I used the term disk signature instead of partition signature.

[dayrelton]

Brian, Dave:

Brian wrote:

"But the OS running was probably the recently installed OS in the 60 GB partition. Schizophrenic system."

After cloning, when I booted, the cloned drive was the active F partition

The OS that cmae up was clearly mine as my desktop and files where there as logical drive C

Furthermore, all installed software [Office and programming environments] were there and ran properly.

Thus the registry being accessed was also mine.

Tech-house partition with drive letter C was appearing as logical drive E and I could browse it.

I successfully restarted [at request of system updates] the system 2 more times and it always came back to my desktop.

I accessed Xcell each time without any issues and did some work after the 3rd boot.

After shutting the system in hibernation, the next day, boot failed with the dark screen and flashing underscore.

But, assuming there is something schizo, what if I do the following after I re-clone:

Before restarting I make the tech-house partition drive G and then change the clone partition to the now freed-up drive C?

So for the next boot, the active partitiion is now C [clone] and it will become logical drive C.

It's 4:40AM EDT and ready to try again with original drive defragged [hoping imaging and xfer will go faster].

Also will make sure cloned drive is has partition drive letter C and tech-house has G before booting.

Thanks, Jim

[Brian_K]

Jim,

I read your reply #3 again and thought how could that be? The first and the second partitions are C: drive when they are booted. I've never seen that before and I did some tests and then realized my tests didn't replicate your situation. I was doing multiple clones of the one partition but you were using two different WinXP OS. So I used two different WinXP and both OS boot as C: drive. We mentioned this shouldn't happen because of the same partition signatures. But as partition signatures are made from the disk signature and the partition offset this explains why you succeeeded. The disk signatures were different because you had two diffferent HDs so each WinXP had a different partition signature.

If you want to clone WinXP from the 80 GB HD to the new HD, delete the 100 GB partition and do Copy Drive to the 100 GB of unallocated space. Choose a drive letter of None in Copy Drive and the booted OS will take care of assigning the C: drive letter to itself. It needs to be C: drive because of the thousands of entries in the registry which already reference C: drive.

[dayrelton]

Brian,

It is my understanding that whatever partition is active - regardless of the drive letter you see in Disk Manangment, easeUS or NG - when the Active partition is selected from the MBR by the bios, it starts the OS's bootstrap [in MBR] that in turn loads the OS from the Active partition [Linux, Windows, whatever].

The OS does whatever it wants, and since it is Windows XP, it assigns the boot partition logical C: and the DVD logical D: and the other partition on the physical boot drive as logical E: - given that XP must see that it is formatted with NTFS and thus is compatible file structure for reading by XP.  [if the other partition contained Linux, I assume it would have not appeared as logical drive E; - a good thing to test].

And yes, each physical drive [my original with one partition and the new one with the tech-house OS] is bootable and comes up a logical C:

Regardless of which one I put in the laptop and boot with the other drive in the USB caddy, the one booted gets logical drive C: - if the drive booted is the new one, then the other [cloned] partition on same drive comes up as E: and my original drive in the caddy comes up as F: - and,  if I swap the drives in the laptop and caddy, my original drive gets assigned logical C: and the tech-house partition becomes logical E: and the cloned partition is assigned logical F:

You said "the booted OS will take care of assigning the C:"

Yes, when any booted Windows OS runs, the booted [coded active in the MBR] partition becomes logical C: and agrees with the registry entries contained in the same partition.

I think we agree on all of this.  About to run NG again as both physical drives have just done Windows updates.

tech-house OS on new 160G drive is set active and will boot and contains NG.

I will erase the former cloned partition from it as you suggest and let NG do its thing.

The source is my original drive in the caddy - whatever drive it shows in NG is what I will use as source.

Since NG and the OS is not running off the original drive, there should be nothing open or accessed there to mess up things.

Here we go at about 6AM [I will note all drive letters as seen by Windows, Disk Managment, easeUS and NG]

Thanks

[Brian_K]

Jim,

Let me describe my first test which is typical of what we see in the forum.

I cloned WinXP (XP1) to unallocated space on the same HD. Using the Active partition technique you mentioned, XP1 booted as C: drive still. XP2 booted as G: drive.

I cloned XP2 to unallocated space on the same HD. XP1 booted as C: drive still. XP2 now booted as H: drive. XP3 booted as G: drive.

My point is the original XP is the only one that boots as C: drive. The others are schizophrenic. Using parts of themself and parts of XP1.

I then deleted XP1 and XP2. XP3 wouldn't load into Windows. I zeroed the disk signature on the HD which allowed XP3 to recalculate a partition signature and assign C: drive to itself and the OS loaded and performed normally.

[dayrelton]

I put the new drive in the laptop and:

C: is assigned to the booted active boot partition [tech-house XP]

E: is assigned to the clone on same disk

F: is assigned to my original in the USB caddy.

My Computer, Windows Disk Management, easeUS and Norton Ghost all show the same drive assignments.

[all are apparently from the logical assignments made by what Windows sees when it boots as opposed to something hardcoded in the partition table]

[note to self - think I will search for MBR formats to see if a drive letter is a data item in each partition's entry]

[remember, the clone was originally assigned F as it was the last partition added in the logical scheme when 1st created]

Now the clone starts out as E: since it is a non-active priamry NTFS partition on the boot disk.

I deleted the E: clone using Windows Disk Management, all other drive letters remained the same.

Started NG and selected F: on second disk as source and 'unallocated' on first disk as destination.

Norton offered up E: as the drive letter and a designation of primary - as one would expect since E is next unsed logical letter.

And away it goes - only to get an I/O error after 15 mins.

Simply have restarted and it has run longer this time and has done at least one image dump to the clone area.

[flashing once every 3 secs on source when building image, furious flashing on both when transferring]

Will post again after a successful cloning.

I here what you are saying about multiple same OS, but jsut do not see how there could be any bleeding over.

When you say 'zero the signatures' do you mean removing the drive designations?

I plan to try using Windows Disk Management to make the tech-house OS some other drive - such as G: and then assign C: to the clone [which is going to be assigned E: by NG.

My fear is that by changing the clone to C: before shutdown might cause the running OS to write to the clone in error as it is now C:.

This is why I think all you have to do is let the clone become active as E: and when you shutdown - no conflict.

And when you reboot, E: now becomes C: and the former C: becomes E: - all logically.

We will see what happens ......