XXClone boot.ini problem

Hi surferdude2,

You recommended XXClone (about a month ago) and I finally used it. Copied my C, D, E, partitions to a new drive and for now (other than the drive letters being wonky) I noticed that the boot.ini in the cloned drive is, well, screwy.

The cloned drive shows only one OS in the boot.ini:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "XXCLONE: (Cloned Volume) [d:0,p:1] \WINDOWS" /fastdetect

And yet in the main drive boot.ini it shows 2 OS's:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XPProfessional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "Microsoft Windows XP Professional(2)" /fastdetect

However, both boot.ini's show the same default OS:

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

Do I need to amend the cloned disks .ini to the same as the main drives .ini?

 

No, definitely not. What you see is normal and by design. That version of the boot.ini on the cloned drive is only going to be used if you disconnect your present primary drive and boot the clone as a PRIMARY drive.

The boot.ini file that resides on the primary drive is what controls the boot process. That's how the XP boot process works. You'll notice that when booted to the cloned drive (dual-booting with the Primary system drive still connected) and checking in Disk Manager, the cloned drive will be called the boot drive and not the system drive.

In other words, if everything is working, don't fix it.

 

@Steve:

I only have one OS: Win XP Pro. I have 2 drives, though; 1st one is the "main\do not test\leave it alone" drive, and the 2nd drive is the "breakme" drive where I test everything new out, tweak, etc., and if it doesn't crash the system, I'll do it on the 1st drive.

@surferdude2:

I understand, and thanks. However, my Cloned Drive is now over twice as large as the original drive (5.5GB Used, 2GB Free -- when it's supposed to be 2.5GB Used and 5.0 Free). Is there a backup file(s) that I can delete to get the space back? Everything is working except System Restore.

 

Chris, I think you'll find that the discrepancy in size is due to the location of your paging file. Xxclone does nothing to bloat your drive except to store a copy of your Registry in case of some problem. That's pretty small potatoes though but you can delete it if you don't see the value. It will be the very last folder in your Windows directory and is named xxclone.arc.

 

Hey Dude,

I checked and there were, literally, GB's of .arc files. And, I always keep my page file on my D partition.

Also, System Restore didn't work. I kept getting "rstrui.exe ", and "srrstr.dll" errors out the wazoo.

I finally had to go to Services and set SR to Disable; rebooted and started it again. No joy and there were still 3GB's too many. So I reset it to Automatic and embarked on repairing System Restore.

I went to C:\Windows\inf and right-clicked on "sr.inf" and clicked install. And, of course, I had to navigate to the i386 folder on the XP CD. But, it worked. It reset\repaired the SysRest and all the extra 3GB's of ______ disappeared!

I've got a couple more questions, but it's after 9:00 pm here on the Left Coast and I haven't et yet. I'll post my followup questions tomorrow. (insert smilie of me stuffing my face here)

 

Hi surferdude2,

Quick question: After I finally got rid of the excess, I used Defraggler (it took awhile) and when it was done, I used the MS Defrag and clicked Analyze. There were about 3MB of files that couldn't be defragged, but they were index.dat files and most of them I was able to delete.

However, when the analysis and report were done, the bar graph showed a solid blue box without any white or red lines like it does with the original drive I cloned from. So, I ran MSDefrag and it added about a dozen white lines to the bar graph! I ran Defraggler again (much quicker this time), did the MSDefrag Analyze again and the box was a solid blue box again. I'm going to use the cloned drive as my main drive now.

Anyway, that's not the question; the question is: I didn't remember that I set the cluster size on the original drive at 4k. And, when I formatted and partitioned the new drive, I set the cluster size to 512 bytes. Do you think copying 4k cluster size to 512b may have been the problem?

 

No, the cluster size wouldn't make any difference to Xxclone. If by a problem, you mean why System Restore didn't work, I suspect it's because it is not a portable type program given the dynamics of the Windows operating system. If any drive difference is detected, it likely goes into a funk. That's just a guess since I never use System Restore so don't really have in depth info for you. I tried it when first getting XP and found it to be of little value. I use Acronis True Image for my system restoring.

FYI, Xxclone copies data rather than sectors (as some others do) and in doing so automatically renders the target drive defragmented.

 

Hi surferdude2

AHA! Thanks for the info. I've tried several cloning utilities and they've always been lacking in that they, as you mentioned, copy sectors and not the data. Unfortunately, XXClone is only 99.98% hassle free.

Seriously, though, what I've always been looking for is a utility that'll copy the HD from head 1, sector 0, cylinder 1 (or wherever the HD starts) byte by byte to the new drive. XXClone appears to be the answer for me.

Thanks, again.

 

Chris, I thought you would come to appreciate the different approach that Xxclone uses. Now that you have managed to use the program and appreciate what it can do, it's time to read the Help files that come with it. It will give you information about all of the features of Xxclone. You have only scratched the surface. It has some great tools that you need to be aware of for future use.

One caution I will pass along - Always double check that you have the Source and Target volumes set properly. Getting them reversed can render very disappointing results. Just think, you could clone an empty drive to your system drive - not exactly what is normally wanted!