Backup - Drive Image - Cloning

[Bob]

What happened when you changed the boot order and tryed to boot from the cloned drive? Any messages? Did you try moving the data cable from the c drive to the h drive (leave c disconnected) to see if it would boot?

The appearance of the 2TB drive looks like it may have been successfully cloned from the C drive. It's got the right partitions and the H partition is using about 200 GB (that's less than your 300GB or so on C, but temp folders etc are not copied so it possibly may be ok). If you look at H with windows explorer does it look like everything is there?

Regarding the change of motherboard. It's complicated. Part of the issue is the motherboard and disk drivers. But, there is also a dependency on whether the motherboard uses bios or EFI. If you backup or clone a system that was created on a bios motherboard and try to use it on an efi motherboard, it won't boot. Some drive backup/restore/clone programs try to address the driver issue, but I'm not aware of any that address the bios/efi issue.

[George Tyndall]

George,
FYI
Are you aware that the Photoshop Elements 7 Organizer expects that on a system which has multiple disk drives , eack disk drive will have a unique serial number. People who have cloned a drive and then used both drives have experienced problems.

I am not sure, but I thought this might apply if you have both of your internal drives connected.

I will have only the internal source and internal target drives running durng the cloning process--no external HDDs, which are where I keep all my data, will be attached to my machine.

The only time that both internal drives will be connected is during the cloning process--and I will use either the Linux-based or WinPE3.0 CDs to boot the system prior to beginning the clone.

I'm going to make the clone tonight after I finish reading the pertinent parts of the User Manual for Paragon Disk Manager Suite 11 (which has a special price, thru Dec. 25, that allows one to download the product to 3 different machines for home use).

Regarding the unique serial number issue, I use SmartSyncPro to back one external HDD to another. If I click on the database file for the Organizer on either of the two HDDs, PSE7 opens, however, if it is the backup drive, the thumbnails take a bit longer to appear in the Organizer--but they do appear, and so do all my keyword tags, albums, categories, etc., as if nothing happened. That's one of the many reason why I haven't moved on from PSE7.

[George Tyndall]

What happened when you changed the boot order and tryed to boot from the cloned drive? Any messages? Did you try moving the data cable from the c drive to the h drive (leave c disconnected) to see if it would boot?

Jonathan of Fry's advised me to simply disconnect the source drive and attempt to boot with the target drive, however, when I did that, Windows informed me that it could not boot and that I would need to insert my Windows System Restore disc (if memory serves, it said the BIOS were missing).

I did that and the machine did boot, however, what I got was an old desktop that I haven't used for months!!!

As I had a recent backup made with Acronis, I decided to attempt to Restore to the target disk from that file. Sixty-nine minutes later, Acronis informed me that the Restore operation had been successful, however, when I booted the machine, that same old and outdated desktop reappeared!!!

So, I disconnected the power and data cables to the target drive, reconnected those for the source drive, and booted without issue.

Regarding the change of motherboard. It's complicated. Part of the issue is the motherboard and disk drivers. But, there is also a dependency on whether the motherboard uses bios or EFI. If you backup or clone a system that was created on a bios motherboard and try to use it on an efi motherboard, it won't boot. Some drive backup/restore/clone programs try to address the driver issue, but I'm not aware of any that address the bios/efi issue.

Jonathan made the same statement that you did in the past, namely, stockpiling hardware is a fool's errand, however, he also said that hp has likely already stopped producing the motherboard for my machine, in other words, if ever I need to order a replacemenet, it will be one that has sat on a shelf for some time --"if it is even still available." He added, "As soon as you boot your computer, all the capacitors may blow from lack of use." Nevertheless, fool that I am, I ordered one for $103, as I would rather have one in my possession and see it explode than to not have one and be told, sometime in the future, that it is no longer available and "you should have bought one when they were still available."