Using a HDD Clone

[hawkeye62]

I have two SATA HDDs on my Win 7 PC. The first is the system boot drive and the second is a clone of the first made with Paragon Partition Manager 11. The clone even has the same signature as the first which has resulted in Windows 7 marking the drive inactive and not assigning drive letters. All of this is OK, if my first drive failed, I could replace it with the clone and Windows should see it as a new first drive, mark it active and assign appropriate drive letters.

But, since any SATA HDD can be used as the boot drive, not just the first in the chain, I have been thinking about how to use the clone as the boot drive as a check. I came up with this procedure and would like to know if it would work.

1. Use diskpart to change the signature of the second drive (The clone.) back to it's original value. Win 7 should then mark the drive active and assign drive letters.

2. Use Win 7 Disk Management to remove the drive letter from the first partition (System Reserved) which normally doesn't have a letter assigned. (Maybe Win 7 won't assign a drive letter to this partition.)

3. Use the PC BIOS to set the second drive as the boot (System) drive.

4. Boot the PC to the clone drive.

Any comments or suggestion will be much appreciated, Jim

[Vulcan]

@hawkeye62:

With respect, these are really Win 7 sys admin questions, and so they are off-topic here (i.e. you are not asking a data recovery or HDD repair question). This type of question would be much better suited to a Windows-focussed forum, since the behaviour you're talking about is specific to the OS and, to a lesser extend, the BIOS disk probe order of your specific PC.

FWIW, I would not be doing what you're talking about. Leaving your "backup" disk inside the same PC as the "live" copy, means that your backup is exposed to several risks that could affect both disks (meaning that you then cannot use your "backup" disk, when you most need it), and it also starts to require additional procedures as you're finding out.

If your reason for this configuration is that you need quick recovery from a disk failure, then I suggest you research RAID levels with redundancy, e.g. RAID1 (either h/w or s/w RAID - some Windows versions include this functionality), but RAID is not a substitute for having backups.