Have I Wrecked my Windows 7 Partition?

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Titan91

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Aug 11, 2011
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I cloned my system hard drive using an external cloning dock, and attached the cloned disk via USB and booted from it to be sure the clone was successful. The original hard drive was still in the machine. It began to start from the USB HDD, but I noticed the internal system disk was showing activity! I immediately powered off, removed the external drive, and booted from the internal system drive again. Windows failed to start.

I'm running the system repair wizard. Did I just ruin my system partition?? Is booting Windows from a USB HDD with a SATA drive connected a bad idea? I highly doubt the cloning dock did this as it should not touch the original source drive, only read from it. System is a Dell Optiplex 745 with Windows 7 Pro.
 
Solution
rgd1101
The problem was you powered off when the internal system disk was showing activity. Never do that.

If you want to test to see if it possible booting from the external, unplug your internal hdd.
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Titan91

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Aug 11, 2011
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The repair worked. Guess that's what happens when you get bad advice. It's all good now. But yes it could have just been booting from the internal disk. Of course I would never otherwise force a shutdown during startup but I had this feeling that Windows was "getting confused" about what drives it was accessing. I've seen it happen before, I actually had to reinstall Windows for a friend. It had encountered this bizarre condition where evidently the system folders were being mirrored to a second partition on the hard drive. Really wild...
 
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