Windows 7 mirrored hard drive.

Faithiee

Faithiee

Member
So I bought a new hard drive a few days ago and figured I'd mirror my old one on to the new one.

It all went pretty well (abit too well, looking back at how much bad luck I have with computers normally) and the mirroring was done.

Few days later I figured that I should unmount my old drive and put it in a box for a backup-copy if my new drive should fail miserably. Said and done, I took it out of my computer and started it up with the new drive inserted.

Guess what? My bootfile didn't follow in the mirroringprocess.

Some googling around took me here, and now I wonder how I could possibly use EasyBCD to make my new drive work as a bootdrive, and not just a drive with data on it for no reason.

Thanks
 
If you clone a Vista/7 system (with a BCD), then chances are the clone will have an identical BCD to the original.
Unfortunately, the BCD contains UIDs describing the unique identity of the original HDD.
This won't match the UID of your new hardware.
Take the W7 installation DVD (or make yourself a W7 repair disk (Control Panel > Backup and Restore) if you don't have a DVD)
Boot it > "repair your computer" > "startup repair"
do the above line three times.
The cloned BCD should then reflect the true identity of your new hardware.
 
Ah god damnit!

Now I tried to repair it but it didn't work at all. It couldn't even locate the disk physically. (yes, it is plugged in) Do I have to have my original HDD connected aswell?
NOTE: In the Disk Manager both HDDs shows up when the original one is plugged in. However, when it's not plugged in, it won't even locate the disk.

Do I have to do something in EasyBCD first?

Anyway, thinking I'm gonna reformat the new HDD and re-mirror my old HDD. Been something funky with the resynching thing.

Alright, not even EasyBCD can find the new bootfile if I create one for the new HDD. BUT I can access the partition I created for extra storage by going Computer -> (G:\) STorage.
Could this have any impact?
 
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If you're talking about IDE HDDs, you can't just remove the old one (probably jumpered as master) and boot from the new one if it's jumpered as slave.
With SATA HDDs it doesn't matter, but the IDE architecture requires that a single HDD either has to be jumpered as master, or jumpered as cable select and attached to the end (black) connector.
 
Woops, stupid me. Forgot to mention that it is a SATA HDD which is why it's so weird.

Maybe it's just Windows 7 pre-installed mirror device that's not working properly, and if so - are there good freewares that copies the bootfile,system etc?
 
Are you sure the clone was good ?
If you boot the old W7 with the cloned disk mounted, then aero-snap 2 Explorer windows side by side, do the 2 HDD contents look identical ?
 
That's the point - I'm not.

Thing is, in the Computer Management tab both HDDs are listed, and both are Mirrored/Cloned with the exact same thing - C:\System/apps and D:\Other storage.

Both HDD shows up in BIOS aswell, if I make the new HDD(cloned one) the boot-disk, nothing happens and Windows 7 asks me for a bootable device.


In the Computer-section I can only see C and D as usual, there's no "double" when both HDDs are connected to the MB, but I figure that this is because it's cloned and thus both represent C:\ and D:\

But now after searching some in the Backup and Restore-tab in Control Panel I saw that you can create a system image on a backup disk. Maybe I should do that first since that'll probably copy the bootfiles etc. to the new HDD aswell? Or does it just create a .iso-file with the system on it for me to burn to a DVD?
 
It doesn't matter that the clone thinks it's C and D too.
Disk letters aren't real, they're not physically attached to the partition like the label is.
Each individual OS has a map of the partition letters in its registry, either from user assignations (defined in Disk Management), or by default assigned dynamically at boot.
Your clone should appear to the working OS as two partitions with the first 2 unused letters of the alphabet, regardless of the fact that the cloned OS also thinks of itself as C.
When I boot my W7 it's C: and it sees my Vista as I:
If I boot Vista, it is C: and it sees W7 as I:
That's perfectly normal, and inevitable because each letter can only be associated with one partition or device in the registry of each individual OS.
If Explorer on W7 doesn't see the cloned drive contents, then it doesn't sound like the cloning did what you thought it did.
How does Disk Management report the cloned drive ?
 
It reports my cloned HDD as healthy, just without the flags. I suppose I can remove the mirror and reformat it and then try again.

Pretty weird that even when using the Win7 DVD to repair/install them again on the new HDD it says that the HDD is an unknown device, and thus it can't repair nor re-install the files. However, in Disk Management it's a health disk.
 
Healthy doesn't help a lot.
Look at my config, and you'll see Ubuntu is "healthy" but completely inaccesssible to Windows (no listed file system, because Windows doesn't acknowledge the existence of ext3/4 etc, so can't even assign a letter)
Does your clone appear as an NTFS or FAT partition ?
If not, there's the problem.
 
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