booting to cloned drive

[Heathen]

This actually was the 1st part of restoring my system, but I think it was lost in my last question.  I'm going to clone my drive onto an external drive partition set up for this purpose.  If the restore tanks, I'm going to have to boot to this drive.  However, I once remember reading something along the lines of complications with this, as the registry entries show program locations in their former locations, not on the newly-resident partition. 

Is this true?  If so, is there a solution for this?  I'll be using Maxtors' Maxi-blast to make the cloned drive.  It also makes a boot disk.  I'm confused about this, too.  Would the Maxtor boot disk, if used, be attempting to boot to my (worst case scenario), newly-deceased C drive, or the cloned drive?

[patio]

It will not boot to an external drive if it is anything newer than Win2K....unless some SERIOUS finagling is done.
This is by design.
You will have to hook it up internally as a master drive.

[Heathen]

It will not boot to an external drive if it is anything newer than Win2K....unless some SERIOUS finagling is done.
This is by design.
You will have to hook it up internally as a master drive.

OK, that does sound intimidating. 
Is this because of the references in the registry to the location of the programs in their former place on the other hard drive?  Or is this some sort of hardware complication?  All I've even done hardware-wise is install new memory, detach the malfunctioning floppy "A" drive, and insert the internal Maxtor drive into an external case & connect via USB.

All I would need, at bare minumum, from this clone, is to be able to restore what I had (flawed though it might be), in case the restoration crashed & burned.  If its possible to do this, I don't need to use the clone as a permanent substitute for the C drive at this time.  This would be possible?

[RatPack]

I'm going to clone my drive onto an external drive partition set up for this purpose.  If the restore tanks, I'm going to have to boot to this drive.  However, I once remember reading something along the lines of complications with this, as the registry entries show program locations in their former locations, not on the newly-resident partition.

Go ahead and clone your drive to the external hdd.  Then assume that your restore has bottomed out and try booting from the external drive, there's no need to restore anything, just boot from the external.  No harm can be done.

I have lately done something similar to what you are attempting but using an Internal slave hdd as the destination.  I use Seagate Disk wizard to clone to a dedicated backup hdd which, after cloning, is bootable.    You can view my post and the responses here.

Good luck

[patio]

Heathen,

As the above advice is contradictory don't let it confuse you.
What program are you using to clone with ? ? This may make a difference as different ones vary slightly.
If you are looking for a backup for your drive you may be better off with an image program such as Ghost or Acronis True Image.
The advantage to this is the image does not need to exist on a hard drive...it can be burned to CD/DVD and restored at anytime using the program itself.
This would free up your external drive for other uses...

Cloning is better suited for simply replacing a hard drive for a newer/ larger one.
The clone has to exist on another drive with nothing else on it for it to be used successfully.

The other advantage of an image program is you can also run scheduled backups that will update your image file on a preset schedule. This means your 1 image is updated with any new data / Programs etc. that have been added since the last image was created.

Let us know...

[Heathen]

Thanks, but unfortunately, too late, I'm already confused
I did try the procedure RatPack outlined (as well as his boot.ini), cloned the drive onto the "L" partition on the external drive, because it did seem simpler, but it didn't work.  Instead, after choosing to boot from Win xp slave,  I got the following message:

"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.  Could not read from the selected boot disk.  Check boot path and disk hardware.  Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals   for additional information."

You had mentioned that cloning was better for replacing the drive.  As I'm getting that low whine upon startup from the C drive, I figured that I would eventually have to replace the drive, so why not work with a clone instead of an image?  Another concern was that I had heard many times that going from win xp pro to home means reformatting the drive.  If I reformat, and something goes wrong with the xp home installation, would I still be able to recover the drive with an image?  Do you think I should replace the clone with an image?  I am using Maxtor Maxi-blast 5, which was developed by Acronis. 

Heathen,

As the above advice is contradictory don't let it confuse you.
What program are you using to clone with ? ? This may make a difference as different ones vary slightly.
If you are looking for a backup for your drive you may be better off with an image program such as Ghost or Acronis True Image.
The advantage to this is the image does not need to exist on a hard drive...it can be burned to CD/DVD and restored at anytime using the program itself.
This would free up your external drive for other uses...

Cloning is better suited for simply replacing a hard drive for a newer/ larger one.
The clone has to exist on another drive with nothing else on it for it to be used successfully.

The other advantage of an image program is you can also run scheduled backups that will update your image file on a preset schedule. This means your 1 image is updated with any new data / Programs etc. that have been added since the last image was created.

Let us know...

[Deerpark]

First of all, ignore RatPack's post completely, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He says in his post he's only been cloning to an internal disk, not external. Like patio said, you can't boot XP from an external drive without doing some serious customization. XP was designed this way.
I would suggest going with an image as well. It takes up less room and is better suited for backup as you can compress it. You will still be able to go back even if you format and install another operating system on the disk.

[Heathen]

Good!  Thank you, off to make an image, also get ready for monthlong holiday houseguest.  Back later with the results.

[Deerpark]

Sigh.
Since Ratpack made a reply in his thread here.: (which is now locked)

I just want to make a quick comment here.
No, getting XP to boot from a external drive is not as simple as mirroring a running XP installation to an external drive. What patio and I have been trying to tell him is that XP have built in safeguards that prevents it from being booted from an USB device. These safeguards needs to be removed in order to create an USB bootable XP installation.
There are guides on how to do this, but I don't even see the point in posting one here since imaging is a much faster solution to the problem you had. I.e. creating a backup of your old XP installation just in case.