Dual Booting with 2 HDD's - Please offer tips

I would assume so but have no way to test that. Check in xxclone to see if it is recognizing your dynamic drive as a Source. If not, you're out of luck.

You would have to have a bootable system to access the xxclone software. From there it would be the normal method of selecting the proper Source and Target volumes.

If I may offer some unsolicited advice, consider using a disk imaging software for your backups. It will compress the images so you'll need less space to store them. It will also allow booting to a restore CD or floppy and deploying the image when the system is no longer bootable into Windows. I use Acronis True Image but there are others out there that may serve you as well. I prefer Acronis since it allows making incremental images so the operation takes place very quickly and I am comfortable making daily images.

Edit. I forgot to mention another drawback of cloning versus imaging, the clone takes the entire drive (wipes all other files) while drive images can be directed to a folder on the drive.

 

Yes...I used the trial version of Norton Ghost before all this happened and it seemed to be very user friendly. I didn't try to restore anything with it, though.

 

Ghost is a fine one. Whichever you choose, be sure to make the Rescue Disks they are capable of creating so you can boot from a CD or Floppy and perform a restore of a backup image. That's an important strength of imaging.

I missed that in passing so I will say that it's obvious that xxclone will recognize your Dynamic Drives OK so restoring from one as a Source would be possible.

Yes, you are correct. The [d:0,p:1] and [d:1,p:1] is the good stuff. Don't let the rest of it confuse you. The disk number and partition number says it all really. The ARC path assignment conventions starts counting at 0 for the primary drive.

BTW, you can use xxclone to easily change the text of the boot menu in the boot.ini file. Just run xxclone and click the Cool Tools button. Select the c: drive as the Source drive and select the drive you want to modify the menu line on for the Target drive. Click the "Add Test Boot" button and then wipe all the text in the "Appearance in the Boot Menu" field and type whatever you want in there. Click OK to finish the edit. You can use this procedure to edit all line, even the C: drive. To do that just select the C: drive in both the Source and the Target field and do the changes as before. Using this feature, you can make the boot menu read as you like. None of this text affects the boot process, it's just for your convenience and information so make it say what you want. It's much easier using xxclone than explaining how to find and manually edit the boot.ini file to someone given it's "System ", "Hidden" and "Read Only" attributes. xxclone handles all that without a peep.

You can also use xxclone to edit the boot.ini file on drives other than the C: drive if you should need. Just select that drive for the Source drive and select the drive you want to modify the menu line on for the Target drive. Proceed as directed before. Notice that the "File to be Modified" will now indicate whatever Source you have selected. Most people will never to use this feature but I thought I'd throw it in to show the neat possibility.