Can you create a bootable mirror of an SSD on a larger HDD?

[Carson Dyle]

I was wondering if it's possible, as something of a contingency measure, to image a 64GB SSD being used as a system drive onto a 1TB HDD in the same computer, such that the image would be bootable with a change in the BIOS or something similar. The system would be running Windows Server 2008 R2.

So if the SSD dies, switch to the HDD and continue on without much fuss.

I'm not talking about a real-time mirror. It would probably be an image taken daily. Can this be done?

 

[VirtualLarry]

It is exceedingly unwise to boot any flavor of Windows, in my experience, with both the original, and a clone, both connected at the same time.

Windows gets very confused.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I'm not following. How would it get confused?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm not following. How would it get confused?

Trust me, it does. I know from painful experience.

There are various ways to identify disks, and various boot-time subsystems in Windows may identify them differently.

 

[jolancer]

I dunno about win server 2008. and i never tried. and what Larrys saying is more than true for partitions, when a clone is on a seperate drive though one might think you should beable to simply select between them. I believe larry though, it is MS after all lol.

you could do it though like this... however you will need to re-enable the clone partition before being able to boot for the first time.

http://forums.justlinux.com/showthread.php?149828-Hidden-partitions-tips

list partition(1) ID#
$ sfdisk --print-id /dev/sda 1

hide sda ntfs partition(1)
$ sfdisk --change-id /dev/sda 1 17


or perhaps even only removing the boot flag from the clones partition untill you need to reflag it to boot would do the trick? I dunno tho, never tired.

 

[Matt1970]

I am with Larry. If you are only going to use it as a backup drive, I would just clone it and then unplug it.

 

[John Connor]

I am with Larry. If you are only going to use it as a backup drive, I would just clone it and then unplug it.

That's what I did.

 

[Carson Dyle]

The idea was to be able to backup the system partition periodically. This would be a server installed in a (more or less) retail environment with no other computers on the network and nobody in house to run backups. I was hoping I could remote in periodically and image the SSD to the data HDD in the same system.

What if the requirement of easily switching over to the other disk was removed? That would have been ideal, since the boot drive wouldn't need to be replaced to be back up and running, but I'll take what I can get. I can always scrounge up another 2.5" disk onto which I could restore the image.