Re: Issues with external hard drives


"PeteK" <YouHaveToBe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dnrnt0$f6f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I have two internal EIDE HDs. My BIOS is set to AUTO mode for these,
which
> I believe defaults to LBA mode (Master is 40GB, Slave 120GB) for large
> drives. I just bought another 160GB EIDE drive. All three drives live in
> removable disk caddies. The intention of this set-up was to give me a bit
of
> flexibility, particularly for backing-up my boot drive.
>
> I successfully cloned my 12GB boot partition on the master (40GB) HD to
the
> External HD.

Am I to assume the "External HD" is an enclosure that has the new 160GB HD??
This reference to the "External HD" has just popped up out of nowhere.

> When I swap these drives, the new (160GB) drive boots OK.

Ok, so now that you've cloned the boot partition to the 160GB (using an
external enclosure?), you've removed it from the enclosure and installed is
as the master, and it operates normally?? Good.

> However, when I cloned the newly created 12GB partition from the 160GB HD
> (in its exerenal USB drive) to the Slave IDE drive, the resulting
partition
> won't boot (it gets so fat, then just hangs).
>

Ok, I'm lost again. Now it sounds like the 160GB is back in the external
enclosure. So what's the story here, are you booting the 12GB partition on
the 160GB from the master IDE, or perhaps booting it from the external USB
enclosure? Maybe it's not even germane, but is getting confusing.

So you've cloned from the 160GB HD to old slave HD (120GB), and now it won't
boot from there? That's the question?

First, if I've read this correctly, all this movement using the new 160GB HD
sounds irrelevant. It sounds like you could have simply cloned the boot
partition from the old master to the old slave and had the same problem.
Introduction of the 160GB is only confusing things (again, if I'm reading
this correctly).

In general, Windows does NOT like to boot from anything but the first HD.
So it's no surprise that it would fail to boot. At a minimum, you would
still need boot files on the master HD, which in turn could boot the OS from
the slave HD. In fact, I use BootIt NG to sometimes boot from other than
the first HD, and for this to wok, I have to use a special feature that
logically changes the HD id from hd1 (the second HD) to hd0 (the first HD).
When Windows sees anything but hd0, it will not boot it. So my boot manager
manipulates the HD id so Windows will boot it anyway.

Of course, all this is somewhat speculative since I'm not even sure I
completely understand the config, I'm making a few logical conclusions based
on scant information. But in general, booting the OS from anything but the
first HD can be tricky. You could perhaps update the boot.ini file on the
first HD to include a boot option for the OS on the slave, which is part of
the problem. BUT, this raises another problem. Your OS on the slave is
probably still C:, but the boot partition on the old master is ALSO C:! In
order to make the boot partition on the old master boot the cloned OS on the
slave, the OS partition on the slave needs to be OTHER THAN C:, like D:, E:,
etc. But you can't easily make that change since the registry on that slave
partition is riddled w/ C: references. IOW, it's probably a mess.

The way to correct the problem is use a good boot manager, like BootIt NG.
You can then use *it* to boot any OS partition, on ANY HD, and most
importantly, HIDE other partitions so you can keep the OS on the slave HD
still bootable as C:.

HTH

Jim


> Could I be hiting an issue with incompatible LBA modes ?
>
> I'm running windows XP2, using partition magic v7 to clone the drives.
>
> TIA,
>
> Pete K
>
>


.

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