XP and Norton Ghost

I'm now running Win98SE and performing a weekly clone with Norton Ghost 2001, rotating four drives each Saturday for that task. When cloned, that drive remains attached to the computer as drive D: in a Mobile Rack and important files (business databases, email, etc.) are copied from C: to D: using a batch file automatically every night. I've found it to be a very efficient backup procedure.

I would like to use the same procedure when I upgrade hardware and move to WinXP in the near future. A friend running XP and having experience with Ghost says that XP cannot tolerate a second drive with a MBR and a cloned OS running on the same computer. I will be upgrading to Ghost 2003, but I'm
also perplexed about its ability to negotiate NTFS. Will I be able to hit f8 after POST, enter a clean DOS prompt, and run Ghost from a floppy as I do now?

If anyone has any experience with Ghost and XP, especially running the cloned drive in the same system as another drive letter, I'd like to know your experiences. TIA.

 

Your friend is wrong.
I have 4 drives, all with primary active boot partitions on them, coexisting within XP (two actually boot XP separately using the boot.ini menu).

You will not be able to hit F8 and use Ghost.
You will have to boot to a startup diskette and run Ghost. Just use the Ghost wizard to create the diskette.
Make sure YOUR version of Ghost can work with NTFS drives.

 

More...

In addition to this friend's warning, I've found two other references to this issue. The first is from the Radified Guide to Norton Ghost (http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_4.htm):

"Your section on Cloning makes no mention of removing the newly created drive from the system. Failure to do so before rebooting will annihilate your registry.

We were moving an OS to a second drive. When cloning, you must remove the cloned drive before rebooting into Windows. Windows will look at the system, scan the registry, realizes its duplicated and deems it's corrupt. Then it creates a new, blank registry, and carries on with that. I tried restoring the registry from the command prompt, but alas nothing. Live and learn. "

Another is from Symantec's site in an article "How to perform a disk-to-disk clone ":

"CAUTION: Do not start the computer after cloning until the instructions say to do so. Starting a computer from the hard drive when the computer has two Active partitions can damage program installations and trigger configuration changes that you might not be able to reverse without restoring backups. "

However, if you are able to run four drives, each with an active partition and a copy of XP, it seems this is good evidence that
coexistence is workable. Anyway, these two warnings are scary.

 

The idea is to clone the drive, remove it, boot the computer.
Shutdown, take the drive out, put in the other, boot.
This updates the registry on both installs.
Repeat if needed, once for each drive.
When multiple installs are on ONE drive, multiple partitions, then anything can (and usually does) go wrong.
Once it's set up, simply adding the proper line to boot.ini gives you a multi-boot.
Note: With two drives you can have two installs of XP, plus any number of other OS's, except Win2k. That is, XP twice, once per drive, and then any number of Win98, 95, 'Nix, BeOS, whatever's...one per partition.

 

Clarification needed

Please help me clarify a few points in your message.

>> The idea is to clone the drive, remove it, boot the computer.

Remove the source or destination drive?

>> Shutdown, take the drive out, put in the other, boot.

I'm having trouble figuring out which drive you are referring to for each step of this procedure.

If I'm understanding this correctly, you must reboot more than once to get XP on track to accept a second drive in the system with an active partition.