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General discussion

Cloned drive - WinXP apps properties refer to original drive

by doniel Aug 31, 2010 4:40PM PDT

I'm going to keep it simple and describe my hard drives as containing one partition each. That's not how my drives are set up, but the real setup is more complicated and irrelevant.

I just installed a new drive. That makes for a total of three drives, giving me C:, D: and E:. I cloned C: to E: and edited boot.ini to add the option to boot off of E:.

It boots from E: flawlessly, but since the cloning procedure didn't change the apps' properties to reflect their new location, they're all still executed from C:. As my goal is to eventually remove the apps from C:, I need to change their properties to refer to E:. Do I have to perform this tedious task manually, or is there some automated process that can acomplish this?

Discussion is locked

4 Posts
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Re: cloning
by Kees Bakker Aug 31, 2010 7:10PM PDT

A clone is a clone and must be used as such. And changing the driveletter certainly isn't "as such".

If you want a working bootable system on the e:-drive, you INSTALL it to the e:-drive, and not CLONE it to the e:-drive. Then install all applications (Program Files and such) also to that drive.

If you prefer to edit the registry yourself, go ahead. I would export it, change "c:" to "e:" using a text editor, import it again and see what happens. An interesting experiment.

Kees

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Cloning vs. installing
by doniel Aug 31, 2010 10:34PM PDT

I didn't criticize the cloning software for not changing the drive letter. I was simply describing the situation I'm faced with and asking if there's any way to automate the process.

As for installing from scratch, there's no question in my mind that cloning is much faster and much more efficient, even if you have to spend half an hour manually changing the drive letter for the installed apps.

Thank you for your reply.

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I have to go with no.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Aug 31, 2010 11:08PM PDT

This issue has dogged many for years. The problem is that when a solution did appear it only worked 98%. That is there were always a few apps that didn't work so that 2% caused the support lines to always be lit up.

That product is no more and we shall not speak of it since it was a failure in other ways.

There is ANOTHER METHOD I use which is to convert the drive to a VHD and run that in a VM but that's another discussion for another day.
Bob

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Going with no
by doniel Sep 1, 2010 1:49AM PDT

Thank you, Bob. From your reply, I gather that I'm going to have to do it manually.

Ah, well, such is life.

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