After I Cloned the primary HD on the slave both show up as local disk and Primary wont boot up alone.

You should never allow the PC to boot with two Windows OS disks attached (unless set as a dual-boot system). That is a mistake often made by users who Clone.

It's safer to do a full disk mode Backup, and then Restore it to the other drive when required.

So now what ? If I partition the clone will the Acronis software make it the way it was before I cloned the slave ? Or do I have to format both disks and lose all my stuff ? Partitioning it will leave me with a blank slave so I assume everything would be back to the way it was. I have an external HD attached by firewire. I could format that , if I put a back up on that just to make sure I have something . I have never used a back up to reinstall so I don't know what I am doing.

There's no reason for you to lose all your stuff. Take the time now to make a full disk backup. Even if you did need to reinstall Windows, you could restore all your user files from the backup.

As for the current situation, likely you can edit the current disk to make it bootable. I haven't done that much, so I'll let another MVP answer.

In future, Backup instead of Cloning.

Thanks I will do that . I never found out if a person can boot up from an external drive attached by firewire. I know When I had a Sata card as well as the IDE cable I could boot up on either and used two hard disks like that on my system . It saved me a few times. All I had to do was recopy one to the other when it crashed. Needless to say I didn't have much to save . I hope I said that right. Thanks for the help. Should I put a back up on both hard drives ?

Use your Windows Disk management module and post a screen capture of your disk management graphical view.
Maybe we can tell from the settings some changes.

Do you have a user created Windows Recovery disk?

I have not used Windows Recovery Disk. I am preparing to use Acronis backup disk. I think the best first move is to install a backup on my external drive . What do you think ? And thanks so much. I notice I can change drive letter and paths in Disk Management. Does that mean I can set my external drive in a way that it can be used to boot up as well ? I have a fire wire..

I am not a technician. I do not have answers to your questions.

Your screen capture shows that Drive C is your system disk and is the one which should be booting.
Both your disks only have the one single partitons which is normal for many XP systems.
One thing you coulld try. If you have the Windows System Restore Checkpoint active, you could disconnect the new disk and restore an old checkpoint with only the old disk attached.

Your problem is that as a result of the clone of your booting with two identical disks attached, is that Windows became confused and made changes to the boot cycle. This would not have occurred if either disk had been disconnected before first boot following clone.

You could also try disconnecting the old disk from the motherboard and connecting the new disk to the same connector as the old disk and attempt to boot your system.

One thing for absolute certain is that you need to immediately assign volume names to your two identical disks. Without names, your disk are ripe for a user error of mistaken identity. You can assign in Disk management or in Explorer.
Right click on drive C, click properties and then option to assign a name become available. You have 11 characters to use without spaces.
Both your identical disks only have 1 partition each but each need to have unique name for eady identity. Many possibilities.
XP-system-C
Extra-disk
Having names assigned means they will be included in your backups and makes the identifying the target disk much easier and safer.

As to whether you can boot your Firewaire, someone else will have to answer to provide the cure to your lack of boot issue.

Ok each drive is named now. System restore did not change things. I still have to have the slave attached in order to boot up on the primary . It gets stuck at Dell screen and the bar that tells you its fully loaded but freezes there. I have made a bootable media disk with systems info as well . It said there was not autostart configured what ever that means . But I made the disk none the less. I guess now I need to decide where to put backups .

No autostart configured means that you did not choose to have the CD to automatically boot into Trueimage.
Instead, the user must be quick and manually choose TrueImage as the Menu selection. Unless the user make the selection within 15 seconds, the CD will boot back into Windows (stop laughing) and appear as if the CD never booted.

If you have the blanks discs, Create a new one and check that you want everthing offered in upper left corner. That willl enable the seconds counter and increase the counter to like 100 seconds. Doing so will cause the CD to boot into TrueImage after 100 seconds unless you choose another option.

Somewhere in your Control Panel options, do you have an option to make a Windows Recovery CD? Being XP, I am not sure you have an option.

Ok I made one with all the checks and had it start up in 20 seconds automatically. I had to uninstall my Media Creator software to do this . Roxio is a selfish controlling thing and wouldn't share the CD drive.. I am guessing I should wait to reinstall it until after I have done my back up system stuff.

I need to watch a you tube on how to use the XP installlation disk and interweave Service Pack three into a recovery disk.

What do you have in the way of TrueImage backups of your Drive C?

None yet .

You should not be without backups. YOu can c reate new ones later after you get to be bootable. If something happens now, you have nothing.

Boot from the TI REcovery CD and create the backup.
Checkmark the disk as the item to be included within the backup. Do NOT just check Drive C. Checkmark the disk.

http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/forum/2009/12/7027/Disk-op…

Ok are you talking about the disk I just made with the three checks ? I didnt buy Acronis , I bought a hard disk that came with a downlad of Acronis. It has a back up tool on it . If your talking about the TI recovery disk I made is the back up in order to put it on the same CD I made ?

You lost me.

Your used space on Drive C is about 35GB. If you had a backup of this, the size of the backup files would be anywhere from 23 to 35 GB in size.

Your drive H external disk shows about 30 GB of used space. Do you have a backup stored there?

One thing you might consider trying.

Disconnect your new disk.
Before attempting to boot, go into the Bios and make sure your computer is trying to boot from the old disk.

My question was why do I have to bot up form the recovery disk to make a backup . Is there a specific reason to do it that way ? I go into acronis TI from the desktop , I says it will take 34,95 GB and there is a box to do it sector by sector .

Backups made from within Windows is perfectlyi acceptable. From within Windows or the CD, either is ok. Backups from within Windows can be scheduled where scheduling not possible with the CD. Some users prefer the CD as Windows not involved. Either way, your choice. Sector by sector not needed for most users. Leave sector by sector box unchecked.

Edit:
If performing a backup inside Windows, I do prefer that the backup type be the "disk image or disk mode" backup. This is illustrated in the first few picutres of link #2 below. The advantages of having a disk image backup rather than the same partitions check individually is that True Image includes the Disk Signature in disk image backups whereas the Partition backup (all partitions) does not offer the restore of this disk signature when in recovery mode. Also, when restoring a disk image bacup, the user has the same choices of individual partitions but can also avoid the configuring of each partition if it is not needed and only has to choose which disk is to receive the restore--which can be a plus in some situations.

If the backup is done from the CD, checking marking the disk option is the same as using TrueImage "disk mode" from within Windows.

Ok I made a backup in the external hard drive , the only thing left I can think of is whether or not to make a back up on either of the internal drives as well and then wait awhile longer for anyone who might know why I cant boot up without the slave attached. Then I will partition the slave with Acronis and see if it undoes what ever it did to make it not boot up without the slave. The only thing acronis offers me is to back up sector by sector and that takes over 450 GB. I guess I will try booting up the recovery disk I made and make a backup with that . You say there will be a disk mode I will check it.

Christan Brodale wrote:

I guess I will try booting up the recovery disk I made and make a backup with that . You say there will be a disk mode I will check it.

I advised you to do that days ago. I don't understand all the extraneous stuff you did since then, when you should have made that backup for safety.

Do not choose sector-by-sector backup.

Tuttle , PTSD from my system crashing , I was an idiot , and let things slide because I used to operate on two bootable Hard Drives . When windows went bad I simply booted the copied the primary onto the the Sata and then sent a new copy over to the other again. Then things changed and I was Ok until my system crashed. I was rusty and had other things on my mind , still do but am trying to make sure I am fit this time. So far what I see is the backup I made while in windows to my external drive is the same as if I boot the Acronis Bootable media disk. I need to make an XP recovery disk with service pack3 .

I found this
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110723185232AAkQhbx
Sounds like you have somehow got the MBR on the slave drive ..

Before I even try anything else . I reinstalled my raid card and have a formatted sata HD set for data. I would like to know is cloning the Slave with the MBR onto the SATA going to make the same problems or will I now have two ways to boot the system up ?

Don't see the point of repeating myself, but: don't Clone. It's safer to do a full disk mode Backup, and then Restore it to the other drive when required.

So what you are saying is I can make a back up with Acronis , which I have done and I can make another. So I now have a Sata drive that is bootable in Setup . How do I restore a back up to the Sata ?

Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots. You will find tutorials on how to Restore/Recover.

I will do that after I breath a little . You guys did your best , and I didn't quite get it. So here is what I did and now things are still not right but they are better. I tried to change the IDE cable . It still froze up on the boot. But I only tried to boot a couple times . Then I changed the Ide Cable back to the original. I rebooted a few times then it pushed through .I got the message the secondary drive 1 was not working. But it booted anyway. When I looked in My Computer there was the slave listed though . Previously before the cable switch I decided to take a chance seeing I did in fact try to clone my Sata 60gb from the Slave thinking because it had MBR on it it would work > It didnt boot and I then download the Seagate disk checker Seatools. It said only one of the disks passed the basic test . So I reckoned that was the one that had the MBR. So when the the Cable change changed how the two ATA drives were being listed at Boot up I deceided to take one more chance knowing that the SATA was a separate bootable port listed in the Set up . I figured I would be safe trying without losing what was at least working . So I cloned again to my SATA from the drive listed first in My Computer knowing it was the one that passed the Seatools test.

I am posting this from my Sata disk. which at this moment is presently in the configuration of My Computer listing as as the Local disk. So now I can boot to either the Primary ATA or the SATA . Both ATAs are listed as 0 and I am told when booting up the secondary 0 cannot be found . However the Secondary ATA is listed in My Computer . I can read up on the above you mentioned to do as far as Recovery goes. I suppose my next move other than keeping my system regularly backed up is to format the secondary and see what happens.

I think you have made the back up as the other MVP's have suggested... (If done, great). Have you looked at the boot.ini file and confirmed the disk configuration and the partition that is marked to boot? There are free partition management tools that can mark partitions as primary, active, etc. There are also tools that will allow you to edit the boot.ini.

Here is a sample for XP:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Taken from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022 Credit MS.

I suggest looking at it. Easy to do in Windows.... Instructions are including in the link above.

Your Dell computer... likely contains OEM partitions... which may include diagnostic and/or recovery features. So it's possible that your partitions will be numbered differently. Your recovery might be easy and only require modifications to the partitions.. (marking as primary, active, etc... ) or, you might need to modify the boot.ini in addition to this. If you have a back up and are unsuccessful restoring your disk's boot environment... you may have to start over and recover your data from an image.

If reinstallations from a diagnostic partition or install CD is desired:

You will need a second machine if you plan to build a custom XP install disk with SP3 slipstreamed.

nLite was probably one of the best utilities available in its day.

http://www.nliteos.com/index.html

I realize this is a lot to take in. We are all trying help you avoid data loss. As long as you have a back up, your data will be safe and you are free to experiment with recovery.

I am getting the hang of things again. I wil look up the terms you brought up and see whether it is something I have already found out or not. Seeing I am not the best at terminology sometimes I am familiar with performing an operation but not know it when one of you says what it is. Sometimes that is easy to explains as a deer in the headlights. Like I said I used to flip back and forth from my Maxtor SATA all the time in order to keep a working HD image alive . I have one now on the maxtor that is was just cloned . Then I recloned that to my Primary hoping to possibly resolve further issues .

I made an installation recovery disk with SP3 without using another system . Not sure why you say I needed to , what am I missing ?. The trickiest part was understanding how to transfer the Boot Image. The only thing I couldn't do as far as instructions on the Image Burn program listed by PC maz article on this was the five key code type given along with making sure the Joliet file type was marked . Image Burn wouldn't accept it on the basis of Hexcode and provided a default. The disk wont work as a recovery disk , but it does boot up and I am going to try a repair on the image in the Sata HD. As far as Data loss and your help I really appreciate your patience and help. What I really loath is reloading all the programs . I use some musical recording plug ins that have a limit on download authorization codes. I will always keep a back up on my external hard drive from now on and update it regularly . So an image isnt the same as a backup right ? I am under the impression a back up is somehow related to reinstalling Windows and integrating the back up to it. I hope I make more sense now. I am an artist and most of my work is not on the computer other than pics. Illness in the family and work has kept me away from proper maintenance of a PC system & I have never done it all right. Recently I have been able to figure out other devices I own do to brain space opening up. But when this system crashed my eyes were spiraling !LOL What a wake up call that was.

Christan Brodale wrote:

So an image isnt the same as a backup right ? I am under the impression a back up is somehow related to reinstalling Windows and integrating the back up to it.

Create a full disk mode Backup, selecting the checkbox for the entire disk (not just individual partitions). That ensures that you have everything you need, and you won't need to understand how the disk is laid out with possible hidden partitions. A full disk Backup captures everything, and is the simplest, safest backup method. You can recover that to the same or a replacement disk (such as after a disk failure), and in one operation you'd be back where you were before the failure. No Windows re-installation or application re-installation needed.

Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots