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General discussion

Attaching external harddrive

Feb 24, 2004 11:27PM PST

I am trying to make the image of my internal hard drive and store it to the external hard drive. I am using powerquest's deploycenter 5.5 software for this. First of all I am creating a boot disk through the boot disk builder of deploycenter and then I am booting the computer to the dos mode through this boot disk. There are several types of boot disks. I am done with the standalone floppy disk and it works well. Now I am trying to boot computer through virtual floppy. Virtual floppy can be considered as an image of the hard floppy. To boot the computer through virtual floppy I have to create .exe file from that virtual floppy. I am doing this through boot disk builder again. When I double click this exe file, my computer boots in to dos mode and runs imagecenter from the virtual floppy, but only when external hard drive is not attached. If I attach external hard drive, and double click the exe file, my computer doesn't boot to dos and it just goes to windows as regualr booting does.
ANY IDEA?

Discussion is locked

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Attaching external harddrive
Feb 24, 2004 11:29PM PST

I forgot to mention that my external hard drive is SCSI and so the internal is.

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Re:Attaching external harddrive
Feb 25, 2004 12:08AM PST

I maybe wrong but here is something you have to consider; when you are in dos mode, "virtual floppy" and SCSI as in "USB" donot exits. Just thinking out loud.

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Doesn't seem like a hardware issue, but a BOOT MANAGER one.
Feb 25, 2004 12:54AM PST

No mention of the OS, but some companies like that of Partition Magic supplied a Boot Magic program to boot from another partition and that software could run from that. BEWARE that such had its own pitfalls in that the partition hiding scheme they used was known to flumox other disk software.

Other ideas?

Put in BOOT MANAGER at http://www.google.com to begin looking over boot managers such as http://www.trombettworks.com/multi-boot.htm which has a long reading about some of the issues.

Maybe a diskette or CD isn't so bad?

Bob

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Re:Doesn't seem like a hardware issue, but a BOOT MANAGER one.
Feb 25, 2004 1:42AM PST

Thanks,
My OS is XP proff. Actually I am not using any phisical media to boot my computer. I am using an executible made from the virtual floppy using boot disk builder of deploycenter (Powerquest product). And the surprising thing is, if I don't attach my external SCSI drive (through 64pin connector) to my computer, and I double click on to executible, then it boots the computer in to dos mode and goes in to imagecenter. But if I attache my external drive and then double click on the executible (which is stored on the desktop) then it boots in to the windows, not in to the dos and imagecenter. That is the problem.
ANY HELP?

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Still doesn't seem like a hardware issue, but now a software bug.
Feb 25, 2004 2:11AM PST

You'll have to take this up with the software's creator.

Bob