ShadowProtect: Imaging drive from another system?

ShadowProtect 3.x desktop [licensed] is installed on 2 separate WinXP, SP2 systems (A and B for example).

Background: "A" system is having erratic lock-up problems, usually within 30 seconds to 1 min. (or less) of booting. Lots of testing, remove unnecessary stuff, drive passed SeaTools, memtest is fine, no viruses, SAS and MBAM are fine, yadda yadda].

I would like to make one more full backup of the problem system before we send the system to the bench. If A's drive is moved to B, the partitions get assigned drive letters G & H, as expected.

The question: While on B, can I use B's ShadowProtect to make a backup of A's drives (now G & H) which in future can be restored on A system using HIR? Or is there some reason that the drive being imaged has to be the booted drive?

 

Even if both drives are system drives-you can back up either drive from the other.
BUT
The problem will be that when restoring,you will have two similar operating systems on one computer .
Can be done awkwardly with multibooting .but when you take an image of the new drive it will contain 2-OS forever,which means you are stuck with it.

Not recommended

You would be better off taking an image of the suspected faulty drive from the good and then use the SP Explore Backup function to copy all necessary data to the good drive.

A really fast free copier is Teracopy.

A reread of your post-sounds like you will be getting a new HDD for the currently faulty computer.

ATM you just want to save the image of the faulty one on the good one and then restore to the new HDD for the current bad one.

Shouldnt be any problems if you also temporarily install the new HDD in the good computer before reinstalling,do all the right things with the BIOS and Disk Management and then transfer the image using HIR.

 

Thank you for your reply and suggestions, Hairy Coo -- I realize now that in trying to keep the background minimal I wasn't nearly as clear as I should have been. The SP full backup will be done to an external MyBook, not to system "B".

At this point I don't think A has a faulty hard drive (1-mo-old Samsung Spinpoint, 1TB, system successfully transitioned using ShadowProtect from the original 2-drive hardware RAID) because when still connected to system A it passed the Seagate SeaTools test (3.3 hours). Connected to B, it's been virus checked twice over and now imaged with SP, and in fact it's still running now, 12 hours later, no sign of any problem. Last remaining test to be run will be chkdsk, but at this point I'm not suspecting the disk very much.

I think it's either the mobo or graphics card, RAM or possibly (last in the list) CPU. I went through a painful mobo-gone-bad scenario (almost invisible bulging capacitor) on system B last year, same (young) age as this one is now, both ASUS, 2 different models. It's amazing how difficult (and even downright impossible) it can be to replace a specific model mobo after 18 months - even though it was under warranty with ASUS they couldn't send me the same model, it wasn't even remotely close or usable. Pfffft.


So, with that background, my questions are, slightly expanded upon:

1. With A's drive connected to B as external slave drive, B's drive letters now show up as G and H. And of course the system on this drive is not the "currently booted" one. Under that circumstance, can I use system B's ShadowProtect to image (now G and H) to an external MyBook. Answer: so far so good, Shadow Protect did the images perfectly. BUT ...

2. When "A" system is rejuvenated, we want to be proactively prepared if a) the existing drive won't plug into a new mobo without issues, or that b) the techs doing the work won't somehow [inexplicably] decide they need to reinstall windows, or they inadvertently trash the drive, or whatever (possibilities under the "stuff happens" category", )

So this is where the big question is: If necessary, can I use ShadowProtect booted from the recovery CD to do an HIR from the MyBook backups (which were made while the system in question wasn't the booted system).

E.g., what about system A's registry? When SP makes the backup while running on system B, would it put system B's registry into the backup because that's the system that SP is running under?

 

Once System A is repaired,and has Windows installed,you can restore an image from MyBook into the new System A,using HIR,if subsatntial hardware change has been made,but not into a smaller partition.
The new Windows will then be overwritten of course,including the registry
You may then need to reactivate Windows and some drivers will need reinstalling,but with a bit of luck,these will be minimal and carried out automatically.
By the sound of it , may be a simple repair.
Could be a lockup/freezing because too many unwanted resources are running at the same time.
Have you checked the Taskmanager or better still Process Explorer?

 

Ah, that bit "and has Windows installed" was the key thing that I wasn't sure about, thank you.

The lockups happened so soon after booting I barely had time to do anything, couldn't begin to run Process Explorer even, unfortunately.

As it turned out, running chkdsk on the drive from a different system saved the day. Strange that Seagate's SeaTools "long" test and the other apps accessing the drive didn't bump into whatever the glitch was, but c'est la vie -- it's a happy camper system again.

Next task is to convince the keeper of the kingdom that even with a good UPS it's time to get an electrical home-run circuit installed.