I am going to use Acronis to clone my current bootable drive. Here's the issue I'm not sure about. After I clone the drive and make the new copy the bootable drive, what happens if I boot up with the original drive connected? I need to be able to format it and wish to use it as a data drive, but was concerned that if they are both connected at the same time . . . bad things might happen! What do you know?QX9650 @ 4.0GHz/1.285 vCore / 8GB PC-800 Mushkin (cheap!) / evga 8800GT @ 660Mhz / 2xSATA 2 drives /

No bad things happen. You have control of your computer :-)In BIOS you can set which drive computer boots from first, so from that one it's going to start.

I am pretty sure Acronis True Image requires you to remove the original hard disk after you cloan a hard disk with an operating system.gb.

I currently use that strategy with my old IDE hard drive machine. With my main boot drive and the cloned drive plugged in, XP would get all confused. I lost both drives a couple of times. Chkdsk brought 'em back, but geeeze . . Now, I leave the cloned drive totally unplugged. With Clones / IDE / XP, Don't plug them both in at the same time. Also be careful with drive letters. Make sure by drive size (or some other characteristic) which drive is which while you are in Acronis. Ive been real disappointed with Acronis in Vista. It messes up directory image backup. Also my full drive image was split into dozens of 5G files. What's up with that? Don't know. Maybe it will get better. Feels like the only real safe way is to make a full disk clone, make sure it will boot, then put it in the closet.

>I currently use that strategy with my old IDE hard drive>machine. With my main boot drive and the cloned drive plugged>in, XP would get all confused. I lost both drives a couple of>times. Chkdsk brought 'em back, but geeeze . . Now, I leave>the cloned drive totally unplugged. With Clones / IDE / XP,>Don't plug them both in at the same time. >>Also be careful with drive letters. Make sure by drive size>(or some other characteristic) which drive is which while you>are in Acronis. >>Ive been real disappointed with Acronis in Vista. It messes up>directory image backup. Also my full drive image was split>into dozens of 5G files. What's up with that? Don't know.>Maybe it will get better. Feels like the only real safe way is>to make a full disk clone, make sure it will boot, then put it>in the closet. Check your settings in Acronis, it may be set up to size the image files for burning to a DVD. I usually try to keep my image file fairly small by only including the OS and other essential programs (virus scanners, browsers, Office, other stuff that's a pain to install) and install other applications afterwards. Usually I'm able to limit my image size to 3-4 gigs that way and I am able to keep it all on a single DVD.

>I currently use that strategy with my old IDE hard drive>machine. With my main boot drive and the cloned drive plugged>in, XP would get all confused. I lost both drives a couple of>times. Chkdsk brought 'em back, but geeeze . . Now, I leave>the cloned drive totally unplugged. With Clones / IDE / XP,>Don't plug them both in at the same time. Geeze is right. Sam, I need to be able to turn the nice Cheetah into a data drive. If I successfully clone the Cheetah to the SATA, what can I do to format the Cheetah? Got to be an easy solution to this one. Doesn't DiskWizard have an option to "hide the MBR [of the source drive] on reboot"?? Must be. This is too simple an issue and one which must come up regularly. If this isn't the case, is there a utility that you can use to do just this operation?QX9650 @ 4.0GHz/1.285 vCore / 8GB PC-800 Mushkin (cheap!) / evga 8800GT @ 660Mhz / 2xSATA 2 drives /

This was all on the old box IDE Box. I certainly hope this goofy 'confused boot' problem was solved since 2000-ish when my Abit IS7 was born. Let's hope SATA and more modern mobos straightened that out. We need a testpilot though. Before you format the cat, try a couple of boots with both bootable drives plugged in. I'd try it my self, but I'm a afraid. Common, try it. I started using images with the new machine. Getting a bit braver lately, though. The trama is starting to wear off. I think the 5G image situation could have been caused by the external HD I used to store the image. That 5G file size does sound suspiciously like a DVD. It had been set to Auto file size. Maybe Acronis can't tell the difference.Once the system is bootin' off the SATA, any format method should work with the cat. Try a right click > format from Explorer. If not, use the 'Write zeros' utility from diskwizard, or Acronis has the same wipe disk function. That'll take it down to bare metal.

Cool, the SATA is booting up fine. DiskWizard sure described itself (the HELP file) as pretty simple and bullet proof, including commentary on what to do when it's time to bring the old drive back online. To be safer, I did disconnect my SCSI cable when I rebooted after setting up the SATA in the boot order. Anyway, I seriously doubt there will be a problem when I format the cat. I read another article re this same issue and it sounds like it's NBD.Thanks and I will keep you posted. Also, when it comes time to back up the new SATA on the 500GB SATA that just arrived . . . I guess I can just partition the new one and save one partition for XP cloned partition, and one for Vista cloned partition, right?QX9650 @ 4.0GHz/1.285 vCore / 8GB PC-800 Mushkin (cheap!) / evga 8800GT @ 660Mhz / 2xSATA 2 drives /