Bootable Backup

For years I've operated W98 with a copy on a 2nd drive. Reach in and unplug the primary, secondary boots. Swap drive letters with a utility and boot the secondary for trouble shooting. This concept drastically reduces the level of Smarts required to recover from... yes, even a Windows Update!

OK, new machine, WinXP Pro (OEM). 2 identical drives of 6 identical (across drives) partitions each. Drive 0 is C: thru H:, drive 1 is I: thru N:. Drive 1 is an Image of drive 0, complete to the VolumeIDs. Drive 0 boots (of course!), but also with 1 disconnected. Problem is, drive 1 will Not boot when connected by it's self as the primary or defined boot boot drive.

Found so far: 1) The backup Must be booted with the original disconnected (at least) the first time to prevent "strong crosslinking between copies ". An example of which is operating (sort of) on 1 with the pagefile located on the other! 2) According to M$, while a Purchased copy of XP can be uninstalled on 1 machine and reinstalled on another (or on a different drive), an OEM copy is "linked" to the harware it's installed on (which in this case can only be the Drive). Reading this over, this info seems irrelevant. I'm sure my WinXP would "Install" to a different drive. What I'm doing is quite different. 3) I see in HKey_Local_Machine\System\Mounted Devices "stuff" that definitey could be disk physical serial numbers.

This doesn't "appear" to be a WPA problem as the Backup stops at the Welcome screen and plays stupid. Now I am ass-u-m-ing that drive 1 (I: thru N defaults to drive 0 (C: thru H when connected singely as the primary? And some of the Startup Items are on the other partitions.

This is spoiling my Whole game plan. The Backup copy might be fine for copying back over the original as a restore? But how can I be sure if it won't boot? And this provides no protection against a physical disk failure. They did it to me again. Can you say Linux next time! I'm stuck at this point, and have asked this question at what I thought were some high powered places, with no results. Impress me... Please!

DES

 

Run a repair install over the clone.
Now it will boot.
Copy wpa.dbl from the system32 folder of the first (original working XP) to the system32 folder of the clone.

 

Reply to Reboot

While what you say may work, it doesn't get to why. I've been busy since posting the original question, so here you go!

See HKey_Local_Machine\System\MountedDevices, DOSDevices. The first 4 bytes of these values. Turns out that in XP (after SP1?) partitions are coded to the physical drive. All that's need is to edit the DOSDevice values to assign the correct drive letters to the drive you want to boot. I kind of guessed at this (since you can assign drive letters in XP) and hunted it down. I just swap the 2 physical drives here, then select the C: thru H: volume to boot in my BIOS.

Now... the catch is, editing the registry of an unloaded copy. See http://www.registrytool.com, the personal version is fine for the local machine.

I now have the switch reduced to 2 .reg files of 12 lines each (since I have 6 partitions per drive). Modifying the Backup from Windows and then rebooting and swapping boot drives works fine. The only thing remaining is to accomplish this Merge in the non-existent DOS, to boot either drive at will. Any ideas on that?

I know, I could keep Fresh copies of the System file, both original and modified handy, and copy them (in the non-existent DOS!)prior to booting. But they're so much bigger, etc.!

DES

 

Addendum to Reboot

I currently use a differential copy utility to maintain my backup, D-Copy 1.8 (http://mirkes.de/en/freeware.php), which ran out of support long ago. It stopped at forcing NT Hives (.dat) and doesn't know about the XP registry format of no extentions, and the associated .log files.

D-Copy compiles a list of differences (configurable), and files on the destination not on the source for deletion. But it won't copy the XP registry components, and I have to handle them seperately.

So I need an up to date utility that accomplishes the same thing, but can force XP registry components and logs?

I can do partition images, and copy the whole OS in under 5 min. the way this system is broken down. But I'm just Mr. efficiency here, and don't believe in copying anything that didn't change you see!