Re: Problem Finding Hard Drive Involving Cloning


"Jethro" <Wilson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:itb3t25cvpemrq8rppkeqcncbhhso84d5c@xxxxxxxxxx
This sure seems strange to me.

I have two 120GB hard drives as Primary Master & Slave. I use the
latter to clone back-up the former. I found it worked fine as long as
I remembered to follow the cloning IMMEDIATELY with a boot-up from
the slave drive so it could initialize. I did this by changing the
boot sequence in the AMI BIOS V8.00.09 that I have so that I would
boot from the slave drive. Then I would reverse the booting back to
normal and both drives would be recognized properly by WXP PRO. If I
failed to do this extra step, I found that WXP would not recognize the
slave drive at all.

That has been fine, until now. I added a third 160GB hard drive as
Secondary Slave (my DVDRW drive is on Secondary Master).
It worked just fine. I decided to start cloning back-ups on that
third drive, and it went fine. Until I tried booting-up from it, as I
was doing before, that is. I am finding that I can boot-up fine from
that drive, but when I look at My Computer, the former boot-drive
(still on Primary Master) is not recognized at all! However, if I
revert back to the normal setup, and boot-up from Primary Master, all
is fine, and all three drives are recognized by My Computer. And in
fact, the clone target-drive looks okay content-wise as I guess it
should since it does boot-up okay.

So I am wondering why this is happening. I'm not sure it is hurting
me, but I think something might be wrong.

Help anyone?

Jethro


Jethro:
Let me first address the information contained in your first paragraph re
the process you followed concerning the disk cloning of your two HDDs. You
were luckier than you thought in that you had no subsequent problems booting
from either HDD following the disk cloning operation. You indicated that
immediately following the disk cloning operation from your source to your
destination HDD, you made the initial boot to the newly-cloned HDD by
changing the boot order of your BIOS so that the system would boot to the
cloned HDD.

While we always emphasize that the initial boot to the newly-cloned HDD
should be undertaken immediately following the disk cloning operation, we
stress that the source HDD be *disconnected* from the system, i.e., no other
storage devices should be physically connected to the PC at the time that
initial boot to the newly-cloned HDD is undertaken. In our opinion, merely
changing the boot priority order in the BIOS (while the source HDD is
connected) is insufficient to prevent potentially future boot problems that
could affect either the source or destination HDD. (That is so even if the
system initially boots to the newly-cloned HDD without any problem). Note I
said "potentially". These problems don't always arise; they obviously didn't
in your case as you related it. But we have seen too many cases where boot
problems *did* occur in the future because the source HDD was connected at
the time the initial boot to the newly-cloned HDD was undertaken immediately
following the disk-cloning operation.

Now as to why your PM HDD is not being recognized in the system when you
boot to your third newly-cloned HDD - I don't know (unless it's related to
the above scenario in some way). I assume that no drive letter has been
assigned to the PM under those circumstances. Have you tried Disk Management
to see if you can manipulate things there? Assuming the PM is also not
detected in Device Manager, have you highlighted the Disk drives entry and
invoked the "Scan for hardware changes" command?

Assuming when you boot to the third HDD you have no interest in accessing
data on the PM HDD, I suppose you could live with the present situation
assuming there's no problem booting to either the PM or the PS and all three
HDDs are accessible under those circumstances. Is that right?
Anna


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