Cloning Hard Drive

I am using Acronis True Image 10.0 with Windows XP and a iomega external hard drive. I have been using this configuration for some time now without any problems. Recently, my computer has been acting up, so I want to clone my hard drive in case something does go wrong with the computer. I thought that I would format the external drive and go through the cloning process. My problem, and question is, when going to the disk cloning wizard, it says that the source disk must be removed after cloning. I don't want to do this at this time. I only want a cloned disk to use in the event that the main drive or computer crashes. I want to have the option to clone everything back from the external drive to a new computer if need be. I've heard that the active drive can be cloned to the external drive with no problems as long as the external drive is disconnected after cloning. Any advice?

 

fredo008,

If you don't remove the source HD and test the cloned HD, how do you know it will boot in the event of a main HD failure? Cloning is one of the most error prone procedures and cloning to an external HD has its special problems too. Play safe, use images.

 

You don't have to remove the source drive after the clone. Just make sure you disconnect the external drive. You never want to boot up with 2 c: drives at the same time.

I do see one problem in what you plan. The source windows xp already has the ID of the external drive in it's registry. When you clone it, the external drive might end up with a "partition ID" drive letter problem. I don't know what kind of problems this might cause when you decide to clone the clone to another drive.

2 general rules to cloning.
http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm

 

I've cloned to bigger HDD's twice with Seagate DiskWizard (limited ATI) and just swapped them out. No problems.

 

fredo008

Clone or Restore using Resize comparison
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1299861&postcount=9