Booting from Wrong Disk

Hello
I have just cloned everything on my C: drive to my D: drive.

I have noticed, however, that scheduled tasks do not work. This is because the scheduled task service does not start on boot up. I looked at the .exe location for this service - it referred to the D: drive.

Does that mean my PC is now booting from the D drive rather than the C drive?

Would that explain why another scheduled backup up process (Outlook - MS add-in) seems to encounter problems (asking me if it should create a folder to back up to; the fact is that there is such a folder on the C drive)?

Would this also explain why the PC seems much slower since I cloned the disk?

Finally, what can I do about this? How can I make XP ignore my 2nd hard drive (D: )?

PS I am using ATI9

 

PLEASE HELP SOMEONE!

 

drl13,

Are you sure the second OS is D: drive? Have a look in My Computer and Disk Management and let us know what you discover.

 

Brian
Thanks for the reply! Yes, the disks are as I've said: C drive is 160 Gig; D drive is 80 Gig.

 

Thanks for checking. See..

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=163053


You should remove the second HD from your computer and think about the benefits of images over clones as a backup technique. Most (not all) of us only use clones when replacing a smaller with a larger HD.


PS Is your OS FAT32?

 

Thanks very much for your continued help Brian. I'll follow up these links over the weekend. In the meantime, can I ask another question?

I have, as indicated, 2 hard drives IN the pc. I also have a 3rd hard drive for backups in an external firewire caddy. My idea is to do backups to one drive, disk clones to another. Currently I'm cloning to 2nd drive IN pc, backing up to external. Should I swap the external drive with the 2nd internal drive? That would mean I was backing up INSIDE the pc and cloning to the external disk.. Would that get rid of the problem?

 

drl13,

Could I add another link to the several I posted in that other thread. Backup strategies.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#13

Backup is personal and this is my approach. Forget clones completely. One of the links argues against clones. I image to my second internal HD, daily. Baseline images and incrementals. I only image the OS partition and I use data backups for the data partitions. Every week or so I connect the external HD and copy an image from the second HD to the external HD and synchronize my data backup to the external HD. I then remove the external HD to another area. So I'm using the external HD as a secondary storage area for backups. The primary storage area for backups is the second HD. All images and data backups to the second HD are scheduled so it's no effort on my part.

Most image restores are done for software reasons, not for HD failure (which is rare) so it's really convenient and fast to restore a recent image from the second HD to the first HD. No case opening. If you have a dual HD failure then you still have images and data on the external HD, stored elsewhere.

Well, that's what I do.

 

Thanks for more advice! Stupid question: what's the difference between an image and a clone? Does TI9 do images?

 

Sure.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#14

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=1132968474;start=7#7

See Reply #7 above

 

Many thanks for your help Brian.

 

I hope it makes sense. Imaging and cloning is certainly confusing at first. Ask more questions if you need help.

 

Brian
I've now read throught the links you've posted - very helpful.

Here's what I propose to do: follow your daily and weekly backup system (I have the same hardware set up).

But what is the difference between your "image" of the OS going onto D:, and your data "backup" going onto the same drive? Are imaging and backing up basically the same process?

Thanks.

 

No. Completely different. I use SecondCopy 7 for data backup. Basically it just copies files and folders from the first HD to the second HD. So if you looked at the backup on the second HD it would appear the same as the first HD data partition. I don't like data backups (Acronis, Ghost etc) that use proprietary files for their backup. I like to see that it's the same.

So if you added a file or two and deleted a file or two from your 100 GB data partition then the data backup process (synchronization) would take about two minutes as opposed to a few hours for an image backup of this data partition. Imaging data partitions is inefficient.

 

You clone and you make a second drive look just like the first.

When you make a backup (sometimes called imaging just to confuse people), you make a file that can be used to put everyting backed up onto another disk such as putting it back on a system drive after one gets replaced.

You can puts lots of backups on a drive but when you clone you only have one didsk that's a replica of another.

If you clone a win system drive and leave both plugged in when you boot, only one will be a bootable system drive thereafter. Windows sees two identiacl system drives and marks one as the system drive and one as the boot drive -- it might mark one drive as both boot and sys and it might not. IN cthe latter case, some of the files that Win used to look for on C drive it will no look for on the second drive. So cloning serves little purpose if you are going to leave both plugged in.

If you remove one fo the drives right after cloning and before rebooting, then either drive can be used as a system and boot drive so long as the other isn't plugged in -- you can swap them but you can't run them both and have them both remain bootable.

 

Hi shieber,
I don't think imaging is a term just to confuse people. IMO, the more common definition of backup is more aligned with what TI calls a Files and Folders backup. An image in my mind is a special backup that contains all of the information to restore a drive containing an OS and have it bootable. Yes, down in the detail level alright.

In general terms, a clone is a backup, an image is a backup and a Files and Folders backup is a backup but when discussing problems there has to be a distinction made. I do agree it is confusing especially for people new to a program like TI.