Re: Starts only with floppy disk

Beautiful John, it is sometimes nice to soar with eagles, this turkey has
grown some wings....
I am in your debt now, name your gift.
I am writing this on the other drive as system drive.
Changing to the other drive in BIOS brings up a copy of this one on the
other drive.

PS. if I may ask, what other thing were you thinking off?


Regards,
Reima

"John John" <audetweld@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uQNsT4jEIHA.4028@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Instead of cloning the drive again you can try this:

1- Disconnect the parent drive.

2- Use a Windows 98 boot diskette and use fdisk /mbr on the cloned
drive.

Fdisk /mbr will leave the partition table intact but it will rewrite the
disk signature and when you boot the drive the Mount Manager should assign
a new drive letter to the disk when Windows is rebooted. Being that the
parent drive will be absent the disk signature and letters assigned to
that disk will be invalid so the Mount Manager will use the now available
letter C:\ to assign to what it thinks is a new disk. If you don't have a
Windows 98 boot diskette you can get one at bootdisk.com. If using fdisk
/mbr doesn't work post again, there is one more thing that could be tried
before you reclone the drive.

John

Reima wrote:

Now that is right on the nail, I was wondering why it used to work before
and that is probably cause I had just installed the other drive and it
might not have been enabled on the first boot, ( I am 69 and my memory
does not serve me that well anymore)
Right so I unable the normal drive for a bit and change the start for the
other and that should do it? But last time I tried it, without taking
this drive out ( they are both SATA drives, so it is easy to just pull a
cable), it did not load explorer so no nothing on the desktop except
picture of my dog. Maybe I should clone it again?, before I try your
excellent idea.
Did spend 3 hours on baking it up and integrity checking on DVD's, 3 of
them.
Who knows they might even work.
Regards,
Reima

"John John" <audetweld@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ej7BoWfEIHA.1168@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

See in-line replies:

Reima wrote:


Aha! John, that done it.
When I marked that Boot Partition as Active it changed over to Healthy
System, first I did not understand what you meant, seeing that all I
could see was Boot and Active.

Now to the cause, what could have changed it to boot partition?

I'm not sure what caused the partition active flag to be changed, it
could be something to with the disk cloning and the attempted booting of
the cloned drive.



Now there is not any Boot Partitions at all.
The other disk is Active and this one is System.

That is normal if the boot and system partitions are on the same drive.
Remember parts of the earlier definition:

"The system partition can be, but does not have to be, the same volume as
the boot partition."

When the System partition and boot volume are one and the same you won't
see any label for the Boot volume, you will only see the System label to
describe the partition.



Will it change over again if I try to start with the other disk by
changing in BIOS?

The label(s) for the partitions will change depending on which hard disk
is booted, but the active status of the partitions will not. When the
disks are set up independently from each other they will boot to
different System partitions. When you boot the second disk it will
become the System partition and the partition on the first disk will in
its turn simply be labeled as the Active partition. The System and Boot
labels are not persistent, they are applied to the partitions that are
actually used to boot the operating system. Once booted, as far as
Windows is concerned, the other disks which were not used to boot the
operating systems are simple data disks, even if they contain an
operating system and boot files, to Windows they are neither System nor
Boot partitions or volumes, they are just data disks. On independent
drives with completely independent NT operating systems the partition
hosting ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini must be the Active partition.



I thought that if I have the same system on 2 different disk's, then if
one died I would be able to access all the recent files by running it
and using Ghost images that I save there about once a month.

That is a fairly good way of doing it. It is not 100% failsafe, if
lightning hits and completely fries the computer both drives could be
lost, or a nasty virus could wreak havoc on both drives. For that reason
some folks prefer external storage media for the user data. I think the
plan you have is a fairly good arrangement, while not 100% failsafe, it
is unlikely that you will lose both disks at once.

One thing that is important to remember when you clone a hard disk and
attempt to boot it is that the first time the clone is booted the parent
drive should not be visible to the cloned disk. It should be disabled in
the BIOS or the power/data cable to it should be disconnected. After the
cloned drive has been successfully booted once you can then reconnect or
enable the parent hard disk for subsequent boots. If you don't take this
precaution (or take other alternative measures) the Mount Manager's
assignment of drive letters may not correspond to Windows installed drive
letter in the registry and the clone may not successfully boot. After
the first boot, and when both drives are once again connected, you should
be able to boot to one drive or the other by toggling them in the BIOS
boot order.

John







.

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