booting a clone from a Slave HD

Both points are untrue.

1) All that is necessary for the destination drive to boot
   is for the destination drive to at the head of the
   BIOS's hard drive boot order, and that the destination
   partition be marked "active".

   To put the destination HD at the head of the HD boot
   order, enter the BIOS at startup time and manually
   change the boot order.  Directions will be in the user's
   manual.

   To mark the destination parition "active" (if there are
   more than one partition on the destination HD), use
   Disk Manager (rt-clk MyComputer/Manage/DiskManagement).
   Rt-clk the graphic of the destination partition and if
   "Mark Partition as Active" isn't grayed out, click on it.

2) One can *certainly* boot from a Slave HD.  Master/Slave
   settings have no meaning at all to the boot loader.  All that
   is necessary is that the booting HD be at the head of the
   BIOS's HD boot order.  That can be done in either of two
   ways:

   a) Enter the BIOS at startup time and manually put the
       the HD at the head of the HD boot order.

   b) Remove the Master HD, and the Slave HD will
       automatically move to the head of the HD boot order.

       No diddling with the jumpers is necessary in either
       case.

(MVPs:  Please test these statement yourselves so as to
stop propagating popular myths.)

Use the usual precautions when booting a WinNT/2K/XP
clone for the 1st time:

   Don't let the new clone OS see its "parent" when it
   starts up for the 1st time.  The easiest way to do this
   is to remove the source HD before booting the clone.
   Thereafter, you can reconnect the HDs (jumpered
   however you wish) and the clone can be booted with
   the "parent" OS present - which will be seen by the
   clone as just another Local Disk having its own file
   structure, and files can be dragged 'n dropped
   between the tw HDs' file structures just as between
   partitions on the same HD.

   If the clone OS is *not* on the HD at the head of the
   BIOS's HD boot order, it can still be started if the
   the boot.ini file on the booting HD is amended to
   "point" to the partition on the HD that does have the
   clone OS.  IOW, you can implement multi-booting by
   amending the boot.ini file.  But amending boot.ini and
   using WinXP's built-in boot manager to multi-boot is
   a topic for another thread.

*TimDaniels*

"Richard Urban" wrote: 
If you want to boot from the hard drive you just copied "to",
you have to change the cables and jumpers on the drive so
the drive is the primary master drive. You can not boot from
the 2nd drive while it is connected as a slave unit.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: "NTLDR is missing"
    ... Ghost to clone. ... remove the "parent" HD ... up automatically if it's the next in the HD boot order. ... head of the HD boot order). ...
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  • Re: Master/Slave issue
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    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
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    ... for the first time I get a system error saying that it can't find "multidiskrdiskpartition" ... the BIOS's hard drive boot order (the boot order specifically ... This boot order should be displayable in the BIOS ... new HD is at the head of that list. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
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    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
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