I have an SSD as my Win7 boot disk and a second drive with 2 partitions - partition1 is the same size as the SSD with the intention of holding a bootable copy of the SSD, and partition2 is a large data holding volume already in use.
I had this setup before under XP and used Paragon software to keep the boot disk cloned to partition1. It saved my bacon on my old PC when my 10000rpm WD raptor boot drive overheated and died one hot summer! I just unplugged it and booted off the other disk in seconds.
Trying the same setup with NGhost all seemed to go well - I copied the boot disk to partition1 on the other disk, making sure to NOT set "copy MBR" because I didn't want to lose the already filled/in-use data partition2. I also did not set "make active" on the destination as I figured I could set it active later when I need to.
As usual I wanted to test the bootability of the copy, but after unplugging the SSD, the PC wont boot off the copy - "autochk not found error". So I booted off a Norton Recovery CD and set partition1 active. I also noticed that it reported no boot.ini found! Anyway still no luck - "autochk not found" again. At first the copy partition had no drive letter assigned, so I assigned one (E) but that didnt make any difference.
I put the SSD back and booted off it, only to find that my data partition2 on the second disk had disappeared! It took a while for me to realize that it had somehow become hidden (although the boot copy partition1 was still showing). Very strange. I used diskpart set id=07 to unhide partition2 and I'm back where I started. An apparantly good copy of the boot disk on partition1 that just won't boot, and my Windows repair CD couldn't fix it either.
Where am I going wrong? I have to proceed carefully as I do not want to trash my data partition on the disk holding the OS clone. (BTW there are no recovery or other partitions on this home built system).
Thanks in advance
JD