Boot with cloned and main HD in place?

[atanasoff]

For some experiments I want to boot the machine from the 2nd HDD (in optical bay) while the original drive is installed. The 2nd HD is cloned, so it is primary, bootable, and has a C: partition. I have heard this leads to some sort of disaster, but the manual states that I cannot casually remove/replace the main HDD too many times (it gives no hint as to how many).

i) What happens if I boot with the original and cloned drive installed?
ii) if something undesirable, can I work around that without physically yanking the main drive?
and

iii) How many times can the main HDD be removed/replaced without creating an unreliable connection?

The main drive is the original Hitachi.

[rkawakami]

I) In my case, it hosed the data on both of the drives (basically made them unbootable) and I had to resort to a recovery disk to rebuild the system. This was on a Gateway desktop but I believe that the principle applies to any system which has an identical copy (i.e., clone) of the boot disk on another drive. And this was trying to boot the system from the main drive; I did nothing special to select the cloned drive that was still connected.

II) Not that I know of: see above .

III) Unknown, but I have a T23 test bed (stripped down of all unnecessary plastic pieces) in which I sometimes put a newly received hard drive in for testing purposes. I have probably yanked/reinstalled a couple of dozen disks without any apparent degradation of the interface (i.e., it still passes PC Doctor and other disk diagnostic tests).

[atanasoff]

Sounds like an experiment I don't need to do at the moment!

Did it hose both MBRs, some other Windows boot file, or something even more frustrating?

Is this a Windows specific phenomena, or is it a result of the basic PC spec?

[rkawakami]

My understanding is that it affected the registry on both disk images and prevented me (or rather, the computer) from offering up the login screen. With no way to login I just re-built the main disk. I suppose it may have been recoverable by using Safe Mode or some other such tool, but this was many years ago with my first experiences with XP so I just threw in the towel and loaded the Gateway recovery disk.

This happened when I used Norton Ghost 2003. I've used no other program for cloning so I don't know if this would happen with any cloning program, but this was one site I found which explained the issue:

http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_4.htm

[atanasoff]

"My understanding is that it affected the registry on both disk images and prevented me (or rather, the computer) from offering up the login screen."

You have to love Windows. Take a safe, conservative action to provide a 100% backup and Windows will kindly insure that both the original and backup are corrupted instantly!