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Cloning a dual boot system

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I have a dull boot system. The first partition contains windows 98 and the second partition contains windows XP. I want to clone the windows XP partition onto a new drive, to have as a backup incase of a hard drive failure. After cloning, the new XP partition will boot to the blue screen with the small windows XP logo then hangs. The same thing happens if I clone the entire drive, but windows 98 loads and functions normally. Any help would be welcome. Thanks.

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Quote:
Insert your windows disk.

Then reboot into the recovery console. Enter the following

Bootcfg/rebuild



Sorry to appear picky, Digs old chap - perfect advice but you need a space before the switch - as in bootcfg /rebuild.

tigsounds said:
Are you absolutely certain the drive was cloned?

Was XP running at the time of the cloning operation?

How did you clone the drive?

Norton ghost indicated the clone was complete, and partition magic indicated data had been transfered. I used windows XP when I cloned the partition. I used ghost 2003 to clone the XP partition onto a drive that was formatted and marked active.
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So XP was running during the clone? You said..

Quote:
I used windows XP when I cloned the partition.

Bad idea. Norton/Symantic make promises they can't keep.

Use a dedicated program that runs outside of Windows to do such critical things.

When Windows is running, things change by the second. How can anybody make a true image then?

Download this program I named Hitachi from HERE.

It is an ISO format file, so must be burned back again to CD. Boot with it.
It can do many things with your hard drive including cloning from one drive to another or partition a drive and format in seconds rather than hours. It is not junk by any means. The source and destination partitions do not need to be the same size, as long as all the data will fit. Just in case you are going to a smaller drive.
Use it to get it done right.

Quote:
<snip>

The windows 98 partition did it share a drive with xp before you cloned it?

<snip>

ANSWER those questions and I can tell you exactly why your getting a error

+1


Now That should have been the first question !

We never know what somebody did when they come here so that question is not one to ignore. [:tigsounds]

Yes I have problems with norton ghost 2003 but not with the current version - I am using paragon cloning and acronis. You need to clone the entire drive.

You can use a self booting paragon to clone the entire hard drive you can also check the drive for errors - I guess their is something wrong with the steps you made.

Quote:
did you do the rebuild in the recovery console?

The windows 98 partition did it share a drive with xp before you cloned it?

Was windows 98 the first OS then XP?

ANSWER those questions and I can tell you exactly why your getting a error

windows 98 was on the same hard drive as windows XP. Windows 98 is on the first patition. Yes I did a rebuild in the recovery console. I can clone the entire disk using norton ghost 2003 and both windows 98 and XP will boot properly, but I cannot clone XP by itself. I also tried a master boot record repair which did not help. Thanks.

I have cloned the entire drive and both windows98 and XP boot and run properly, but I cannot clone just the windows XP partition. Perhaps you can only clone the entire drive and not just a single partition. I do have a backup of the hard drive and that was my main concern. Thanks for all of the help from everyone.

Best solution


Once both are cloned to the new drive, there's nothing to stop you deleting the '98 Partition which will have the effect of format and will delete everything on it then renaming the Volume. Then, in XP, go to msconfig>Boot.ini and click on Check all boot paths whereupon it should remove '98 from the list of options.

Saga Lout said:

Once both are cloned to the new drive, there's nothing to stop you deleting the '98 Partition which will have the effect of format and will delete everything on it then renaming the Volume. Then, in XP, go to msconfig>Boot.ini and click on Check all boot paths whereupon it should remove '98 from the list of options.

I am not sure what I do with the partition that windows 98 was on. Do I leave it unformatted, reformat it as a fat partition or NTFS partition. If reformatted AS NTFS can I merge the empty partition with Windows XP? Thanks.

dannied said:
I am not sure what I do with the partition that windows 98 was on. Do I leave it unformatted, reformat it as a fat partition or NTFS partition. If reformatted AS NTFS can I merge the empty partition with Windows XP? Thanks.




I think merging would be a bit risky but an NTFS format would give you some backup space for your XP personal files.

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