Clone without changing which is bootable drive

Is it possible to completely clone to another drive and NOT force the new drive to be the active drive? THe menu options indicate that once cloned, the destination drive becomes the active drive and old one must be removed. I just want to clone with a second drive, and remove the second drive as a cloned backup. THanks.

 

Shouldn't be a problem. Remove the second drive after you've cloned to it BEFORE you reboot the system. The first drive will boot the system.

You should test the second drive by removing the first drive and installing the second (clone) drive. If it boots the system, you know you have a good backup boot drive.

Personally, I don't understand the rational of doing this as a backup strategy. I'd make an image of the boot drive (all partitions) and save the image on an external drive or CDs or DVDs. I'd use an external hard drive because it is faster than optical media and holds the entire image so that it can be Explored and verified easily. This image can be updated regularly as you install new programs, do Windows and antivirus updates, etc.

If the boot drive fails due to a virus or corruption, you can restore the image to it. If the boot drive has a hardware failure, you can install a blank new drive and restore the image to it.

However, that's just my way of protecting myself. Cloning is another.

 

Hi Thanks for the reply.

The reason is to keep a backup as a cloned (exact duplicate) of the drive is it is the absolute quickest substitution to get back up and running again in case of failure. Also, it is really easy to grab an old file from the second (backup) drive if needed without having to go thru software. I've been doing this method for years with Ghost, but I've noticed with a 160GB drive, Ghost took >8hrs. I read Acronis only copied the sectors that are used. I want to give it a trial run and see how much better Acronis is. I don't understand why the force the second drive to be the boot drive. THis should be an option in my opinion.

Take care and I welcome addition feedback.
Sysguru2

 

You don't have to use the second drive as the boot drive. That's just stated that way because most people clone a drive to use it immediately as the boot drive.

One thing to watch out for is having the second drive still in the system after you clone it. Sometimes Windows gets confused by a second drive identical to the boot drive.

Perhaps some users who have tried this could comment now.

 

Hi, sysguru2

It is not realy being forced as the Boot HDD, it is just looks to be that way as jmk94903 says, when people clone a HDD it is mostly to be the new main HDD, the option is there, leave it as slave but turn off auto detect in the Bios or again as jmk94903 says remove it.

It not a mountain, is it.

Take Care,
TheQuest