Drive Clone Questions

I want to clone my existing original hard drive to my secondary internal hard drive so if the original hard drive dies I can boot from the second drive. After I clone the drive and I restart the PC will it ask me which drive to boot from or automatically boot from the original drive? If it just boots as normal how can I test the new drive to see if it will work if the original drive fails? How long should it take to clone a 200 GB drive? Will the cloning process change anything on the original drive or PC configuration? I have Paragon Drive Backup pro 9.0

Thanks

 

1. To boot from the second drive, install the second drive but do not perform the cloning yet.

Enter the BIOS setup and check that the second drive is recognized. If so, boot again and enter the boot menu (using F12 or similar, check the documentation). If the second drive appears in the boot menu, you can use the same procedure to boot from it after the cloning.

If the second drive does not appear in the boot menu, maybe booting from the second drive is not possible. In this case, clone and do the following before the first boot after the cloning: remove the boot drive, install the (cloned) second drive as the boot drive, left the second drive bay empty, boot normally.

2. The cloning should take about 2.5 hours.

3. The original drive won´t be changed. Be careful when you select the source drive and the target one.

 

It's been a while since I did this but, if these are two IDE drives on the same ribbon, one connected at middle of ribbon and the other at end of ribbon, if the BIOS confugration doesn't pan out, it may be a simple matter of swapping the order in which the drives are connected to the ribbon. The primary may be determined simply by position on the ribbon. If so, that would be more convenient for testing purposes than physically swapping drive bays.

 

Yes. I think what is important, especially in Windows XP, is that in the first boot after the cloning, Windows “sees” only one drive, the “new” cloned drive, connected as the old drive was.