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Cloning Confusion - Having 2 Disks As Boot Options

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My PC has a couple of identical SSD drives, which are the C and D drive, plus a couple of other HDD internal drives a a few external HDD drives.

My Windows 10 64 bit operating system is on my C drive and, just after I got my computer, I decided to clone it using Acronis to my D drive. This was under the, possibly naive, assumption that this would give me a fall-back option to boot from the D drive in the event my C drive went down.

After the cloning process, my computer wouldn't boot, but this was easily fixed by going into the BIOS. It turns out the wrong drive was selected in the Boot Priority list and all I needed to do was select the Windows Boot Manager associated with my C drive as the first in the list.

I did a quick check and my computer was also happy to boot from the Windows Boot Manager assocated with my D drive as an alternative, although I didn't do an exhaustive check of running all my software from my D drive. Then I went back to booting using the Windows Boot Manager associated with my C drive.

That was some months ago and I've not had any problems. I was considering cloning my C drive to my D drive again, because I've since installed lots of new software and I wanted to bring the fall-back D drive up to date. I'm motivated by getting up a running quickly in the event of problems.

However, having recently watched the cloning video tutorial, I'm concerned and confused about the warning "Do Not Boot With Two Disks".

My computer seems happy that it has two options, with the Windows Boot Manager associated with my C drive selected as priority (see photo of BIOS I took at link below). In the picture P1 is associated with my C drive and P2 is associated with my D drive.
http://i.imgur.com/dri5XG3.jpg

So I have two questions
1) Is it safe to clone my C drive to my D drive again to give me two up to date boot options, or it is this a bad idea?
2) Should I just leave things as they are, as things are working correctly, or is there a risk in leaving my D drive as an alternative boot disk?

Any thoughts or observations? Apologies I'm a bit new to this and I'm interested in finding out about best practice.

Btw: I also run system back ups to one of my external hard drives, maybe that's sufficient.

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Peter, welcome to these user forums.

Under all normal circumstances, the advice would be to not have two cloned drives installed in the computer, especially if these both have the same, identical drive signatures, as this can cause confusion to the Windows OS at best and corruption at worse.

In your case, your BIOS looks to handle having the two clones installed and is offering you the options needed to allow each to boot independently, which all seems to work for you without causing problems.

Personally, I would not recommend doing a further clone from your main C: drive to the second D: drive in case this causes problems this time through, instead, if you want to continue working with the two drives and two copies of Windows etc, then use Backup & Restore to effect the same end result as doing cloning, but with the additional safety net of having a full drive backup of the source drive to fall back on if needed.

I would further recommend taking a full backup of the D: drive before going ahead with the above.

When doing the Backup & Restore you may want to just do this for the main Windows OS partition on the C: drive and restore this on it's own to replace the Windows OS partition, leaving any other partitions on the source and target drives alone unless a reason arises to suggest that other partitions are needed.

Having looked into it a bit more, can I just check I've understood correctly?

I currently have Acronis set to do system back ups to an external drive (which happens to be my L drive). At the moment it's set to do a full system back up every 5 incremental versions.

So do I:

1) Ensure I take a full system back up of my C drive and also my D drive. The back up of the D drive just being a belt and braces extra safety measure (in the event I ever wanted to go back to that).

2) Restore the back up of my C drive to my D drive.

Thanks for your help and apologies if I'm being a bit slow in understanding.

 

Peter, thanks for the extra information which helps giving advice more clearly.

As you already have a regular Acronis backup of your C: drive to your external drive L:, then this makes the process a little easier.

Add a further backup of your D: drive for the belt and braces safety measure.

You should now be able to restore just the C: Windows OS partition from your backup on drive L: to your D: drive.

This could be attempted using the Acronis application installed on the C: drive but if Windows has locks on the D: drive you will be required to reboot to continue the restore operation.  The alternative method is to do this type of restore using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media which works completely outside of Windows.  The key for when using the Rescue Media is to ensure that you choose the correct target drive for the restore operation.

More questions spring to mind as I think about this.

If I use Backup & Restore to create a copy of my bootable C drive to my D drive (as described above), will the D drive be bootable? If so wouldn't the warning  "Do Not Boot With Two Disks" still apply if I leave the D drive attached to my system? Alternatively, if the D drive won't be bootable, have I gained much, because I've already got system backups on an external drive?

I'm considering is leaving the (curently bootable) D drive as is, albeit with an older version of my system, and continuing to run regular C drive backups to external drives. In the event my C drive went down, I could boot from my D drive, then (maybe) run a system restore taking a copy of a backup file from my external drive to bring my D drive up to date?

Again I'm motivated by being able to quickly get up and running again with my full system in the event of a hardware drive failure, but maybe that's too much of an ask.

Don't worry if you don't have time to answer. I appreciate the help I've received so far. I'm just pondering what my (safe) options might be.

Peter, for myself, if I were in your position with how you have these two drives running the same OS, then I would be tempted to take a middle path to try to ensure maximum safety to achieve the same results.

Quick & dirty would be to just clone from drive C: to drive D: but this carries risks that one or both drives could get corrupted in the process when booting after the clone is done by having the two identical drives / signatures again.

Doing a Backup of drive C: (OS Partition only) and Restoring this to drive D: OS Partition is safer and by restoring only the one partition does not touch the current drive signature on D: (which is held in track 0 or MBR).

Using the Acronis bootable Rescue Media (on CD/DVD or USB stick) to boot the computer with drive C: disconnected then restoring the Backup of Drive C: to your Drive D; from your external drive would be my preferred approach.  I would then leave Drive C: disconnected and boot from Drive D: into the Windows OS to test that all was OK.

If Drive D: boots into the OS without issue, then shutdown, reconnect Drive C: and then boot into that drive and check all is OK.

You will probably need to select between the two drives by choosing the appropriate Windows Boot Loader in the BIOS settings but then will have both drives realligned again in terms of their applications etc.

Thanks for your continued help, which has improved my understanding.

I'm going to leave things as they are for now but I'll return to this thread if I need it for future reference.