Cloning a 2nd drive so both are bootable

My system had 1 SATA 120GB drive and 1 40GB IDE drive. WinXP was installed fresh on both drives, the IDE drive first, then the SCSI drive. The 120GB SATA drive was my normal boot up drive, but I could also boot up into WinXP from the 40GB IDE drive by simply changing the boot sequence in the BIOS from SCSI to HD0 as the first boot device. I could access both drives through Windows explorer with this setup and was great for repairing minor window problems/corrupt files, etc.

I wanted to upgrade the 40GB IDE to a 120GB IDE drive and still retain the same ability to boot up with either drive. I cloned my SCSI drive to the new IDE drive with True Image 8.0. The new 120GB IDE drive does boot up correctly and there's no problems there at all.

The problem is that Windows explorer doesn't see the SATA drive any longer in explorer when I boot up from the IDE drive (it would assign D to the SATA drive when I would boot up off the IDE drive and function exactly as a slave drive, same as the IDE works when I boot up off the SATA drive). The SATA drive is listed in Device Manager as working correctly, and it is listed in My Computer, but not in explorer to access the files.

Is there anyway to fix this with True Image? Or was cloning a drive in this setup the wrong way to do it and I need to reformat and reinstall after all?

I also notice that True Image is installed as a device in Device Manager. Would uninstalling it at this point fix the problem so I can boot up off either drive as I could before? I really don't need True Image for backing up or restoring, I only wanted to avoid having to reinstall everything on the IDE drive.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Hello Henderson50,

Thank you for choosing Acronis System Disk Cloning Software.

Please clone your old IDE drive to the new one. If you are unable to do that for some reason (for example, you haven't got the old drive any more) please do the following:

- Boot Windows from IDE drive;
- Navigate to "Start" -> "Control Panel" -> "Administrative Tools" -> "Computer Management" -> "Disk Management";
- Find your SATA drive (all partitions will be listed) and assign letters to each partition manually.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

The problem with that is that half of the new programs/data I have installed on the 120GB SATA drive won't be copied over to the new 120GB drive, and would still have to be doing a lot of re-installing.

There's no other way possible way around it I take it?

Btw, the SATA drive is not listed under My Computer as I thought it was, checked again.

Edit: Woot! Under Disk Management, I didn't notice that the SATA drive didn't have a drive letter assigned to it, even though it was correctly shown as active and the IDE drive shown as system. Assigning a drive letter there fixed it and it's now showing in explorer.

Thanks for steering me there again.

Also, what happens to either drive if I do uninstall True Image at this point, anything?

 

Hello Henderson50,

You may uninstall Acronis True Image without any risk of loosing your data or any functionality. The letters were not assigned automatically to prevent intefering with the existing disk. When you do it manually the letters are assigned by Windows and there should be no problems in this case even though you have the same content on both disks.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Thanks again for the help. This was by far the most painless way of reinstalling everything to a full drive ever, took maybe an hour to copy the drive, including the formatting which the program did during the cloning process.

Great program, would recommend it to everyone.