Cloning

[donsor]

I wish to play musical rearrangement of my HDs. I have four installed (2 SATA, 2 PATA) My boot drive is an EIDE where my OS (WinXP) resides. I have an empty 36G WD Raptor which I want to use as my boot drive. I downloaded a freeware (XXClone) which has the feature to do this however I have some unanswered questions.

After I clone Windows from the source to the target drive, do I have to disable the source drive? I imagine that one cannot have two bootable drives in effect as the same time. Your take on this please.

[patio]

This usually depends on the BIOS boot order which can be custom set by you....

As to the cloning operation the most successful method is to perform the clone and reset all the drive jumpers appropiately. After doing the clone dis-connect all HDD's except the target drive and do a few cold boots and make sure everything is working properly.
Then proceed to re-introduce the other drives one at a time with a few cold boots each time and adjust the boot order again if it decides to change.

Tedious i know but the best way...

Good Luck and keep us posted.

[donsor]

Thanks for the input. Let me clarify however that the target drive is a SATA while the source is an EIDE, thus the jumper re-arrangement may not be necessary. Specifically, my drives are arranged as follows:

C: drive - Master EIDE (presesntly boot drive containng the OS) 80G
H: drive - Slave EIDE (mostly storage) 80 G
J: drive - SATA (games and storage) 300G
I: drive - Raptor (10K RPM) SATA (previously used for games but now empty and reformatted) 36G

[patio]

You will have to set the boot order to use the SATA drive first then...