disk management confusion

[DH]

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Disk Management has me confused, with
respect to Disk 0 and Disk 1.

Please refer to a .JPG file posted online at
http://www.phpvs.com/misc/xxclone.jpg

The question is this: when I use XXCLONE to back up C: to K: are the
associated System partitions also backed up? Or, as illustrated in the
lower right corner of the picture (but not executed) , does one also
need to select those System partitions in a separate execution of
XXCLONE?

Possibly relevant history on this machine includes the following. Disk
1 was the original disk which came with this PC. I lused the MS Backup
Image tool to create an image of the original disk on an external USB
drive. Subsequently Drive 0 was installed and the image from the
external drive restored to the new Disk 0.

[Dan Anderson]

Hi DH,

I'll throw out the following understanding while looking forward to comments from others. 

The approach that I had taken on my Dell Win7 64bit computer was to use XXClone to clone the main Win7 o/s partition, after first using partition software (e.g. EASEUS) to structure the target drive and copy over the small (100MB) system partition that contains a Boot folder.  I assumed that the role of that smaller partition was specific to Dell, and that XXClone would not clone that small partition. 

I should explain that in the past when xxcloning XP, the configuration that I had set up involved a multi-boot XP structure, with a similar small boot partition that contained only Boot.ini, NTLdr and NTDetect.com files, with the alternative XP operating system partitions installed in various logical partitions.  As a result, I was used to the approach of XXClone not recognizing that non-standard approach and my having to manually copy over the boot partition to the target hard drive, while XXClone took care of the various alternative backup partitions that contained the XP operating system and installed applications.

But my above presumptions regarding XXClone's operations in the Win7 environment might not be correct.

Cheers,
Dan

__________________________________________________


-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	[xxclone] disk management confusion
Date:	Sun, 1 Jan 2012 18:52:11 -0800 (PST)
From:	DH <hock...@gmail.com>
Reply-To:	xxc...@googlegroups.com
To:	The Xxclone Forum <xxc...@googlegroups.com>

The question is this: when I use XXCLONE to back up C: to K: are the
associated System partitions also backed up? Or, as illustrated in the
lower right corner of the picture (but not executed) , does one also
need to select those System partitions in a separate execution of
XXCLONE?

Possibly relevant history on this machine includes the following. Disk
1 was the original disk which came with this PC. I lused the MS Backup
Image tool to create an image of the original disk on an external USB
drive. Subsequently Drive 0 was installed and the image from the
external drive restored to the new Disk 0.

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[DES]

The way I understand it volume means partition with assigned drive
letter. xxclone is after the OS partition. I think it can copy non OS
partitions(?) although that would be rather pointless unless you just
didn't have any other way to copy them.

Normally those restore partitions are hidden, and as your disk0 don't
have a drive letter assigned. Apparently imaging the original allowed
a drive letter assignment (or you did that)? Personally I feel having
clones negates their purpose and delete them, and copy the OS
partition down over that space including it. By the time even the
first clone is created the restore partition has become rather
meaningless. However that's up to you.

FYI, with say Disk0 and Disk1 attached, when C: is cloned to your K:,
to allow K: to be test boot the Drive Letter and Volume Label
Assignments for C: and K: are Swapped in the registry of K:. You may
see this at HKLM\System\MountedDevices\ the DOS & corresponding Volume
values. By Loading the destination (K: here) System Hive (file) into
the running registry (at HKLM) as a False Key (I use Loaded Dat as
this name is used in a commercial product for this purpose). And in
fact can manually manage these items this way by Editing the False Key
(Merging pre-prepared .reg files for this purpose is easiest) and
Unloading the Hive, which copies that back to from where it came from.
This technique presents no danger to the running registry as the false
key isn't part of the running registry, only present in memory. Prior
to xxclone I used to have a 3 system disk configuration (of 6
partitions each) and managed it this way. But it gets very confusing
keeping up with who's who when booting the different volumes. I'm
certain xxclone only thinks in 2 disk sets with the running OS being
the source, leaving the third disk out of the equation. And it
specifically deals with only the source and destination Volumes\Drive
Letters.

However... having 3 bootable copies creates a unique situation, you
can always do Anything between the other non-running 2. And in fact
that's the only way to actually get a 100% complete copy of Windows
from Windows. When coping a running volume the registry at the very
least is always just a snap shot of the moment. There is always
something, usually small and insignificant, but something in memory
that hasn't been put to disk yet until Windows shuts down.

DES