To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 11:02 PM
Subject: External Hard Drive Enclosure
I have an extra hard drive I would like to use for backups on different computers.
Speaking of backups, I feel that something new (perhaps Service Pack 2) has destroyed my ability to easily back up a C Drive partition and restore it or boot Windows XP from the target drive.
In the past I simply copied the whole C Drive to a partition on another hard drive. I could later either boot from that partition (if it was the first one on the target drive) or I could restore from that partition and boot from the hard drive I restored it to.
Evidently Microsoft has incorporated anti-piracy features in Service Pack 2 (or in other updates) to interfere with cloning and sucessfully booting from the drive you cloned a C Drive load of Windows XP to. As I have mentioned many times in the past, cloning within the Windows XP environment is very slow, compared to cloning with ghost.exe prior to loading Windows XP. I guess you still call it Real DOS Mode. There, with ghost.exe I can now copy at the rate of 2500 MB per minute from a SATA hard drive to another SATA hard drive. The last time I posted here about my copying speed, I was bragging about the rate of 1500 MB per minute with IDE hard drives.
My guess is that Microsoft is preventing booting into Windows XP from a hard drive you cloned a C Drive load to because they feel that different hard drive may be installed in a different computer. Pirating is not my purpose. A quick and smooth changeout of a failed hard drive is my purpose in cloning.
I assume that if Windows XP crashes and I have a clone, I can format the C Drive that Windows XP crashed on and copy the clone back and it will boot. I certainly do not intend to try this just for testing purposes. If I try it and it does not work I am faced with completely reinstalling etc. to replace a good C Drive that I formatted. It is not worth that risk, just for a test.
It seems that we OEM's who are holding out on using the Restore DVD process are going to be forced into going to it, if we want a bootable clone that works. I may have to concede to that fact that a restore CD may be the best way to restore a system I built unless there is a slipstreamed Service Pack (one that is not on the clone CD) on my current OEM CD's that would make reinstalling better.
I keep clones of XP installs for only one year. After that there are so many changes and updates that a reinstall is more efficient.
I guess I need to open each OEM CD kit before the customer gets it. Some are confused. They wonder why I was able to install Windows XP using my CD (they get their OEM kit still sealed with the COA removed and stuck onto their computer) and they can not use their OEM CD to install XP to a different computer. They do not have a clue that the COA Product Key has been mated to their computer and a clone sent to Microsoft during authentication. I never do anything that I can not explain to Microsoft on the phone as I know one day I may have to in order to authenticate. I have had to many times in the past.
Chuck
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