By now, anyone who’s tried a conventional method of backing up their Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional system to a separate bootable cloned hard drive has learned that it’s not possible with the conventional methods that we outlined in our Windows 9x article.
I gave you a workable solution to use with Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home to clone a 1:1 bootable hard drive using Symantec’s Ghost that works perfectly here but for that solution to work, it was imperative that you initially remove the perfect backup completely from your computer system. You must physically detach the hard drive completely and set it some place safe temporarily at least.
Leaving it connected and humming along within your system doesn’t work.
But, leaving it connected is the ideal method that can permit you to more easily keep your back up always updated with a synching utility like the fine shareware product Synchromagic.
So, can you have your cake and eat it too?
The optimal method of keeping an up-to-date cloned bootable back up is to perhaps use swappable hard drives by employing a removable tray system such as those available by InClose. Or you can leave your hard drives in place and switch the boot order of your system using your BIOS setup utility.
Leaving your hard drives connected within your system necessitates a different procedure to create a bootable emergency backup copy of your system because despite how simple it sounds, when using Windows XP, it is impossible to instruct your system to actually boot to the cloned drive despite all efforts which can create quite the dilemma.
No matter whether you change the boot up sequence instructions within your BIOS setup utility or physically rearrange the physical configuration of your hard drives within your system, Windows XP has already identified and labeled your cloned back up drive as “D” and will always boot up your system using your original “C” drive.
You will end up with endless looping error messages whose suggestions are futile if tried.
- “Your system has no paging file or the paging file is too small. To fix this problem, go to system in Control Panel, click Advanced tab, and under performance, click settings. On the Advanced tab, click Change, then type an initial or maximum paging file size.”
Cicking “Ok” can net the user a “Windows Product Activation Dialog” which reads:
- “A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer, Error Code 0X8009006.”
You can read more about this in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 310794.
This error message occurs if you’ve installed a program that changed the security identifier in Windows XP, or if a system drive letter has changed.
Microsoft’s Knowledge Base provides a fix to reset the default security provider within Windows XP by deleting the following keys in the Windows registry:
HKEY_USERS.DEFAULTSoftwareMicrosoftCryptographyProviders
HKEY_USERSS-1-5-20SoftwareMicrosoftCryptographyProviders
And, to reset the drive letter of the system drive, by using one of the following methods:
- Undo the action that changed the drive letter of the system drive.
- If you can access the registry editor, update the drive letter for the changed system drive in the Windows Registry by locating the following registry key
HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftCryptographyDefaultsProvider
and change the drive letter in the ImagePath value setting to match the new drive letter for the system drive.
You’ll note that Microsoft says “if” you can undo the causative action and “if” you can access the registry edit, you can correct the error messages.
Originally appeared at Infinisource
Sandra Underhill is the Associate Editor of InfiniSource,a site reknowned as a premier Internet Resource Center, offering
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