New person probably old question - Cloned drive won't boot

I bought Acronis True Image 10. My purpose was to "clone" my hard drive to keep a back up in case the primary died. (I was recently burned by not having a back up drive). My computer uses XP Home Edition. I had a 40 Gig hard drive (WD) in the computer and I bought the same drive but in 80 Gig as the new one. I put the new drive in with the old with a new cable and everything set as cable select.

I loaded True Image 10 and used the "Clone" feature. It seemed to work like a charm. When it was done, I rebooted and it started right up. My inspection revealed that my new "cloned" larger drive was now the primary "C" drive and my old smaller drive was now the "F" drive. Therefore the cloning worked since the new larger "cloned" drive was "C" and the machine had booted off it.

Now, I wanted to test my old (now "F" drive) to make sure that if the new larger "cloned" drive failed, I was still all set.

I tried to boot off the old "F" drive by switching the cable connections. No go. Then I changed the boot priority in the BIOS. No go.

I have been reading some of the posts here and it seems there is an issue that my leaving "both" drives hooked up when I rebooted the first time might do something to disable the MBR? in one of the drives.

Questions:

1) Why did my new bigger "cloned" drive become the new "C" drive? (Not that I am complaining)

2) Did my initial booting up with both drives connected cause this problem?

3) How do I correct it and achieve my purpose of a back up drive?

4) Can I do the cloning again, this time from the new bigger "cloned" drive to the old smaller drive (essentially reversing the process) and then disconnecting one of the drives when I do the intial reboot?

4a) Would there be a problem now that I would be cloning a bigger drive onto a smaller drive? ( I only have about 20 Gigs consumed the 80 Gig drive)

4b) Does it matter which drive I disconnect on the initial reboot?

5) Is there another way to accomplish my task?

Whew! Thanks for your time,

Al Tierney

P.S.: I know enough about this to be dangerous, but am not a PC pro.

 

With windows xp, theres a problem of drive letters changing during the restoration to a new hard drive. When you started up the computer after the cloned was complete, due to you having two similar operating systems, one of them got there drive letters changed. Everyone recommends you disconnect one of the hard drives after the cloning to prevent this.
Another thing that will cause drive letter changes is what you plan to do, which is cloning a larger partition into a smaller partition, even if you remove the hard drive before you restart the computer, the new clone drive will probably be D: or E: drive.
Sometimes it will work but sometimes it won't, this problem usually doesn't occur when cloning a smaller partition into a larger partition.
Theres basically nothing wrong with your original 40gb hard drive, all you need to do is change the drive letter back to C: and it will boot up.

Unless you are perfect everytime you do restorations, you'll run into these drive letter problems with windows xp. I'm not an expert either, but I found out how to modify drive letters. If you know how to change drive letters, you can restored windows xp everytime.

Everytime I restore a windows xp hard drive I always have a utility that can change drive letters quickly. In my case I use "paragon justboot corrector", with it I can change the drive letters in less than 5 minutes and have the restored hard drive working right away. I found this to be the easiest way to fix the drive letter change problem. The hard way is to start back at step one and try to do redo everything back again which can take hours. If you know for a fact that the drive letter got changed, changing it back will usually fix you right up.

Alot of people here in the forums usually recommend you do all types of complicated repairs, from my expierence a simple drive letter change will usually fix the problem.


below are different ways to change drive letters
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=174958

 

agdexter,

Yes, you made a few mistakes but you should be able to get that old HD to boot by zeroing the DiskID. Only have the old HD installed in the computer for this procedure. Remove the new HD.

This CD is a variation of Method #3.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm#method3