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Does editing cloned drive mess things up

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My situation - Using TrueImage 11 Home I cloned my laptop drive running Win XP to a partition on a much larger external drive, than created two more partitions of the unused space of the external drive to use for other purposes.

After opening the partition on the external drive which contained my successfully cloned image, I was surprised to find that I had access to all the files - same as if I was in my laptop's drive. Before giving it any consideration, I created a new folder in this cloned partition and started to copy all the cloned files in the partition into that folder - stopping the copy before the systems files were moved - than reversed the process, i.e., returned the copied files from the new folder into the open partition. 

My question - Did I already mess up my cloned drive partition (on my external drive), i.e., will not be able to restore it as an executable image on a new drive. If not, what can I do in that cloned drive partition, e.g., look at/copy old files from the cloned My Documents, etc. without corrupting it?

My laptop has been acting up - including some blue-screen situations (which is a different matter), and I was planning to purchase a newer-used laptop and restore my cloned image onto it (I don't have all my app's installation disks).

Obviously I have no experience with cloning drives and can't seem to find any info in the forums about this matter.

Thank you for any feedback/comments

Paul 

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Paul

A "clone" makes an exact duplicate of your source drive. Normally a clone is saved until needed, and then installed as the new system drive and used as if there had never been a drive change. The clone should be installed and tested before storing it, some laptops won't boot a clone unless you did some tricks such as the so called "reverse" method.

If you worked with files in the clone it should still work for you but your moved file will still be moved.

If I were you I'd do a few things.

1. Search the forum for "reverse clone" and understand it.

2. Do a new clone to the same drive with the reverse method.

3. Install the clone (also remove the original drive) and boot up and see if things run well.

4. Now you can operate this way, or swap the original drive back into the laptop and operate that way.

Lastly, I'd also think about not cloning at all but to do backup images (not backup files)  to the external drive. This is what I do and it is more flexable offering me more options and a place for more backup images to choose from later.

Fungus

 

 Be aware that whether you image or clone to a new computer, Windows may well sulk due to hardware differences and driver requirements. These can be got around, but you need to be aware of this and if possible should have access to an OS CD/DVD.