Drive Cloning and Drive Letter assignments

Message

Marc_G · #1 Post by **Marc_G** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 10:31 am

Hi folks-

This is sort of a followup to my "tale of two MBRs" thread. Essentially, if I use Ghost9 to copy a drive over to a new HD in the slim bay, which happens in Windows XP, the drive mounts and gets a new drive letter like I:. When I move the drive over to the primary position to use it as the boot drive, it still mounts as I: instead of C: and lots of problems happen.

Any ideas how to make the boot drive be autodetected as C:?

Marc

Sasha · #2 Post by **Sasha** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 10:55 am

Is your filesystem NTFS? I read somewhere that NTFS "remembers" drive letter assignments.

I have read a solution for this on another forum...lemme check...i'll post the solution if I find it....

Sasha · #3 Post by **Sasha** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 10:58 am

Here goes...

NTFS remembers drive letters. This is different from FAT (which was used in Windows 98 and earlier) that dynamically assigned drive letters based on partition types and IDE assignments.

What likely happened is you had the old master and new master in the system at the same time. Your problem was that XP saw that the old master had a bootable OS partition (it's not that it was a master drive) XP saw that "C:" was in use and picked the next available drive letter for the new bootable OS partition.

You can not repair this. I've tried and it's terribly difficult. XP will not let you change the system partition drive letter (Disk Management). The solution is to do some registry editing by hand to swap the partition letters and then track down every place that the old drive letter is referenced.

You need to remove the old drive, then reinstall XP on the new drive (this time it wll be "C"), shutdown the system and boot back up with the old drive. XP will see the confilct with the old bootable partition and should reletter it... if not it'll disable it until you give it a new letter in Disk Management (My Computer -> Manage)

And this is the link

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=12486838

Further down the thread, chek the "solution":?: provided by Spannie!

HTH

Marc_G · #4 Post by **Marc_G** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 11:32 am

Sasha-

Thanks for this.

I checked the solution provided by Spannie... a problem I face is that I can't get into the Computer Management admin tool, unless I keep plugged in the USB hard drive that let me get this far. I get an error and the computer management thing shuts down.

That USB HD is my ultimate "disaster recovery" drive and I'm not making any changes to it like changing letters and so on. Sigh.

So, I might be able to get it to work, but at the cost of screwing up the drive letter of my main backup.

This is pretty annoying, since somehow I got it to work once!!!

Hmmm... Maybe I could mount the cloned drive in my ultraslim bay, with my normal system running in the primary hd, and remove the drive letter assignments of the clone in the ultraslim bay, essentially unmounting the volumes.

Then, shut down, swap HDs again, and see if it starts up.

Marc

Marc_G · #5 Post by **Marc_G** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 12:14 pm

Bummer, that didn't work. Same problem.

I got sick of it and just booted Ghost's recovery CD and re-imaged the partition from an image file. That worked fine. Partition booted fine. No problem.

Sasha · #6 Post by **Sasha** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 12:23 pm

Glad to know that it worked out....

storage_man · #7 Post by **storage_man** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 3:46 pm

Mark_G

If you are going to clone your disk, do it from the bootable DOS Ghost disk. This will eliminate all of the problems Sasha discussed with windows seeing the second bootable drive. Image backups from windows is no problem, but cloning causes problems.

Storage_man

FrankK-F · #8 Post by **FrankK-F** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:37 pm

Some weeks ago my license expired for Notron AV .. so I rushed to Staples and bought the updates .. including GHOST-9.

Maybe I missed something, but GHOST-9 is just another backup tool .. I did not 'discover' how or if I could clone an HDD with it.

Then I started to look the GHOST-2003 CD-ROM, that was part of this upgrade package .. and which it turns out is the upgrade for GHOST-2002 that enables cloning via DOS. The "README" file is a bit misleading about its relevance to W-XP, but it mentions W-2K. So I made the DOS diskette .. and shazaam I have an improved cloning tool.

For me one of the improvements is that I dont have to fool around with a key code to initiate a cloning process .. and the whole process seems to flow more smoothly.

The reason I take these moments to describe this is that GHOST-2003 (via DOS) is my backup strategy. I essence I clone weekly my primary HDD to the next of three identical 72K60's .. and then rotate the clone into the primary position .. as confirmation that the cloning was successful.

It takes about 33 minutes for cloning these HDDs on my A31p -- 2GHz/2GB.

Frank K-F

Marc_G · #9 Post by **Marc_G** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:44 am

Hi Storage_man-

The problem I have with Ghost9 is that there is NO DOS mode!! The bootable disk is a WinPE environment, and I've never figured out how to get it onto a USB key (it would need to be a 512MB key to fit it all).

So, I can't directly clone with it, since my Utrabay needs to hold the CD burner, no room for the second drive caddy.

I downloaded the software so did NOT get the Ghost 2003 disk available only in the retail package.

A kind soul did give me the DOS version of Ghost 2003; haven't played with it much. I used to be a big Drive Image fan, but DI2002 chokes on my T42 images for some reason.

Marc

storage_man · #10 Post by **storage_man** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 4:08 pm

Mark_G

Sorry about that I thought you were using Ghost 2003. I have used 2003 for a number of years and had looked at Ghost 9 and decided not to upgrade. Instead I decided to get Acronis True Image. It uses a LINIX based boot technology that works alot better than Ghost. It even sees my PCMIA USB 2.0 card. Acronis allows you to build a trimed down bootable set of diskettes that only supports IDE (Which is fine for me when I'm CLoning my hard drive to a drive in my Ultrabay). You need to be able to boot from a USB attached diskette drive to make this work. It takes a little longer to boot (Vs. Ghost). but the results are the same as Ghost 2003. The target Clones work like a charm, and can be swaped in as a bootable WINXP disk). The PE version in Ghost 9 will cause you the same problems as running Ghost from windows.

What is neat about Acronis True Image is that if you want to create Image file backups, you can do it from windows, and if you want to build cloned images of disks you can do it from both CD or Diskettes.

Storage_man

Marc_G · #11 Post by **Marc_G** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 7:33 pm

Storage_Man-

Can you get the True Image bootable stuff onto a USB key to avoid the need to deal with either floppy or CD? That would be a big plus for me.

Marc

storage_man · #12 Post by **storage_man** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 7:54 pm

Mark_G

I have a couple of USB keys but I haven't tried to build a TRUE IMAGE boot disk to them, because none of my systems allow booting from that type of device. My ThinkPad has a BIOS option to direct booting from a USB Floppy, which it does ok, but my desktop has no such option - Its either Hardisk 0-3, floppy or CDROM. No other choices. Have you tried to build a WIN98 boot disk on you USB key and can u boot from it. If that is possible then you should be able to build a diskette based boot floppy from True Image.

You can down load boot disk images from WWW.allbootdisks.com

let me know if you can do that ?

Storage_man

storage_man · #13 Post by **storage_man** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 8:02 pm

Mark_G

Well I tried to build a True Image Boot disk on my USB Key drive and YES it did. It actually looks correct. Instead of breaking up the 2.8mb timage1.bin file accross 2 diskettes. it made it a complete file. But like I
said none of my systems allow booting from the USB key device. So if
your system allows you to boot from this device, than True Image could work for u.

Have a great day - Storage_man

Moroner · #14 Post by **Moroner** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 8:27 am

On the original problem with drive letters:
Windows stores them in the registry, under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. If you copy the disks via the second HD adapter, the new copy also gets the same associations as the old one, leading to the problem Marc had. What you can do is mount the copied hive, and then rework the associations. That should get you running properly again.

Marc_G · #15 Post by **Marc_G** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 9:04 am

storage_man-

Thanks for the news about True Image. It's good to know.

Maroner- thanks to you too. Next time I hit this problem, I'll try it out.

Marc_G · #16 Post by **Marc_G** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 6:07 pm

Hi all-

So, I bought True Image and am trying to make its recovery environment bootable from a USB key on my T42P.

It has a "rescue media builder" which recognizes the key and puts the stuff on it. But I'm having trouble getting this key recognized properly in the BIOS. Basically, it's being recognized as a hard drive, whereas it needs to be a floppy, I think.

Any ideas?

Marc

Marc_G · #17 Post by **Marc_G** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 7:32 pm

Folks-

I'm offiicially expiring this thread in favor of a new one at:

USB Keys and boot device types on T42P

in the T series forum. Public apology for double posting.

Marc

Moderator note: Get it here!

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=9296

Drive Cloning and Drive Letter assignments

Drive Cloning and Drive Letter assignments

Who is online