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Can you have dual boot XP on one PC by cloneing the HD to another HD?

T

TriggerHappy101

Golden Member
I have this customer that has two HDs. He clones his XP boot to the other HD and then selects what HD he wants to boot from via the bootloader.

Do you see any harm in this? He does this for backup reasons.

But I dont think its very smart / stable?

Could I please get your input please?
 
Originally posted by: TriggerHappy101
I have this customer that has two HDs. He clones his XP boot to the other HD and then selects what HD he wants to boot from via the bootloader.

Do you see any harm in this? He does this for backup reasons.

But I dont think its very smart / stable?

Could I please get your input please?
Click to expand...


Backup reason? I can't think of any valid reason for doing this. This is an unstable idea at best. Oh well, think of it as job security. 🙂
 
Unless he's re-cloning the main install on a regular basis I don't see how he's backing up anything. If you boot into one OS and then install a program, you have to install it in one place. Once he started using either install they wouldn't really be clones of each other any more.

Either way, there's better ways of doing whatever he's trying to do (RAID, backup software, etc)
 
I'm not really seeing why this wouldn't work (at least conceptually), assuming that you're actually 'cloning' the drive and not just copying all the files from one drive to another within Windows. It's not a whole lot different than making full disk images with something like Ghost (except it wastes a lot of space if you have a lot of empty space on the drive). When you boot off the second drive, it should act exactly as though it was the first drive at an earlier point in time (usually a point before some kind of failure.)

Of course, modifying the second drive in any way before using it would likely be a Very Bad Idea -- and if both drives are installed in the system, a hardware failure (like a PSU blowing up) could affect both drives. Usually you'd do something like this with an external drive...
 
yes, you can do this. I tried to clone the whole drive using Migrate Easy by acronis when i bought a new drive, and after cloning i got two XPs in my PC. but also i use boot manager which acn detect already installed oses automaticaly, without it may be i would be needed to adjust my boot.ini file to have both of oses.
 
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