Just cloned my operating system on a 2nd hard drive, needto attach both hard drives

[Anteries]

I'm a little bit stuck here. Been going mad doing Google searches and getting nowhere.

Basically I've cloned my Windows 8 operating system to a separate hard drive, it boots up fine from the separate hard drive.

But what I want to know is, should I be aware of any problem with attaching to identical hard drives, both with active bootable partitions to the same computer, is there a boot disk utility which you can make a partition non-active.

Much appreciated

[peterb]

Gparted gives very precise control over partition identifiers and flags, however you should be OK as Windows will boot from the drive designated as 'C'. If you are going to re-use the original disk, formatting and re-partitioning it will sort that out anyway.

(I am assuming you are using MBR boot system, not GPT)

[Anteries]

Gparted gives very precise control over partition identifiers and flags, however you should be OK as Windows will boot from the drive designated as 'C'. If you are going to re-use the original disk, formatting and re-partitioning it will sort that out anyway.

(I am assuming you are using MBR boot system, not GPT)

Hi Peter, thank you very much for your reply. I was a bit tired and stressed when I wrote my original post.

I think I've sorted it out, however I tried Gparted which I had forgotten about and it couldn't find my hard disks just kept searching. I've had issues with it working on my previous computer.

I think I found another solution, using my paragon image backup boot disk, there is an option to set the partition as active or inactive. Which I presume means it will boot or not, there is a frustrating lack of documentation.

But just to be clear, I have 2 hard drives with 2C partitions which are active and identical. But I want to plug them both into my computer.

Is it correct that I just need to set one of the active booting partitions as inactive.? Also I'm not fully clear on the terminology I've heard of the master boot record but not the GPT. Thanks

[Kumagoro]

Set the hdd you want to boot from in the bios

[peterb]

If you haven't heard of GPT you probably aren't using it. It stands for GIUD Partition Table, where GUID is Globally Unique IDentifier

As kumagoro says, set the boot disk in the BIOS set up. Afaik, setting the partition boot flag is usually irrelevant.

[stilkun]

Hi Anteries,

I don't think there are issues with identical hard drive, like peterb said the BIOS will boot from drive you have set a primary disk. Marking a partition active points the O/S where to look for bootable information to load the OS and where the system partition is.

I believe you can set mark a partition inactive using diskpart command from within command prompt if you are familiar with it. Boot from Windows 8 cd and choose to repair it and select command prompt, not familiar with Win 8 CD options.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...4-03e94707b13e

Use list command to confirm before setting it.

[Anteries]

I thanks for your replies, I went into BIOS and change the boot order, but only with the quick boot option, and it worked fine, when I rebooted it reverted back and did a repair. Obviously I need to set it more permanently in the BIOS, great tip cheers.

Rather than do this I wanted to experiment with my paragon boot disk, and it gave me the option to set which partition is active as well.

This site is a real godsend much appreciated.

[simplicity96]

If you have two hard drives you want to be able to boot from you need a boot manager. Something like Plop would be fine (you will have to google Plop boot manager as I cant post a link for you) this will allow you to set profiles to different HDD's and choose which to boot from when starting the computer. This also works for partitions.

[Anteries]

If you have two hard drives you want to be able to boot from you need a boot manager. Something like Plop would be fine (you will have to google Plop boot manager as I cant post a link for you) this will allow you to set profiles to different HDD's and choose which to boot from when starting the computer. This also works for partitions.

Hi, just come back to this thread, thanks that looks like a great tool, downloading it now. Cheers