Bootable Windows XP On Two Hard Drive's

[tstewart63]

Question I hope someone can answer.

I have windows xp installed on my C: drive being a sata drive. I cloned a backup of my c: drive onto and IDE drive being an F: drive. I've had no trouble having 2 exact copies of windows on both drives until the other night. I had to do a windows repair on my C: drive after I hosed my system. After I did the repair, when I boot into windows it hangs on opening screen(maybe 30-45 sec- the ide light just flashes rapidly) until the system does boot onto my C: drive. If I disable the backup Ide drive - system boots right up. It seems windows does not know which drive to boot from. Can someone tell me what I need to do to restore my system as before or is it unwise to have 2 hard drives with both copies of windows XP bootable on the same computer?

 

[Jiggz]

The solution is to do the same thing you did before you had two OS's in two hdd. Re-clone C to F again and you will be back to same scenario as before. Now for the question of having two OS's on two separate hdd, what is the purpose? For a back in case of a crash? Well, which one do you think will crash first C or F. My point is if you want an exact back up then use RAID 1 or mirroring. Of you can have an exact back up by cloning and then disconnecting the back up hdd. During a crash, re-connect it and you're back on you feet again except it will not be up to date. So if you want to be up to date on back up, use RAID 1.