Testing backup images

[nickok]

I have two identical 250 GB IDE drives installed in my PC, jumpers set to Cable Select. I'd like to use the slave drive for testing full disk image backups by restoring them and confirming that they will boot up successfully.

I know the advice is to switch or remove one of the drives before rebooting in order to avoid drive letter problems.

The problem I have is that access to my slave drive is very awkward - I have to remove the power supply and a fan cover. Also the IDE cable is very tight and I am concerned that repeated bending and yanking to connect/disconnect it will cause damage. Plus the machine has to be disconnected and moved every time. For me this is a disincentive to routinely testing backups.

The bios in my system allows you to select an alternate boot device by hitting F12 while booting. I wondered if I could temporarily boot from the slave and use the methods outlined in http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm to modify the registry or MBR to prevent drive letter problems?

It would be good to avoid the need to physically mess with the drives but even if I only had to disconnect the master drive while booting the slave it would be an improvement.

Thanks for any advice or ideas

[MudCrab]

Normally, the drive needs to be disconnected or turned off in the BIOS. If your BIOS supports disabling specific ports (some do), then you could just turn off the port for the drive you want to "disconnect" and the computer won't see it. This may not work with IDE drives, though.

Otherwise, I think you should be able to clear the "MountedDevices" key or use the MBR trick and boot from the drive successfully.

If you plan on doing this a lot, you may want to consider getting several removable hard drive trays (assuming they'd fit in your computer). This would allow you to remove (or turn off) either drive as required.

[jonyjoe81]

This is one of those times when you need a utility to change drive letters. Especially if your going to be using windows xp. I recommend the program "paragon justboot corrector", as long as you have a bootcd program that can change drive letters, it takes at most 5 minutes to fix any drive letter problems, the boot corrector can also hide partitions and edit the boot.ini file so you can run expirements to test your backup.

I wouldn't attempt any type of tests unless I had a way of changing drive letters, just in case the worst happens which is your source drive also gets it's drive letter changed and both hard drives fail to boot. Drive letter problems are the quickest to fix if you have the right tools. You might want to download the demo and have a look at it.

I would probably store a backup image on an external drive before running any expirements on the internal drives. The only way to gain any confidence in using true image is to actually test it and see if it will actually restore another drive.