best cloning method?

Beemer Biker wrote
wrote

WOW - this thread has really gotten some legs. Thanks to all for the
advice and guidance - I may try the Ghost route, but now using True
Image seems like a personal challenge. I'll lay out what I did as

true image is much easier to use as rod suggested.

I have cloned a number of disks over the years using true image.
There are a number of pitfalls that can cause problems. Number
one is haveing the new disk already formatted and on your system.

Nope, wont make any difference at all.

If the disk is in an external box then you are ok,
but if it is on the pata cable then there is a good
chance that xp will put its swap file on it

Nope, it will never do that.

and that is where problems start.

Nope.

After cloning the swap file is not present. If you boot your
"new disk" it cannot find the swap file as the original disk no
longer has it (it was automatically put on it because XP does
not know what you are about to do and it sees a new disk that
has plenty of contiguous space and puts the swap file there).

That last never happens.

Usually you see a message "zero length swap file"

Neither does that.

but not always. Sometimes is just wont boot and no message.

Neither does that.

One solution is to use a dos or win98 floppy and rewrite the
mbr. This causes any swap file information to be deleted

No it doesnt.

and on reboot the OS will find a new place for the
swap file. Just make sure after it boots that the swap
file is on the "C" drive or you will get stuck in a loop.

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

I assume you have the latest TI that can clone the disk,
not the older one that required a TIB file to be booted up.

God knows what this is about.

I would delete the partition from the new disk, reboot
and *ENSURE* that the swap file is back on the "C" drive,

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

then clone the "C" drive to the unpartitioned
new drive. This should require a cd boot.

After cloning remove the original C and boot the new drive.
If you want both disks to be on the system you probably
should change the volume serial number of the older "C" drive.

No need, XP does that auto when you put the original
drive back in the system again after booting the clone.

If you change the VSN of the new boot drive that will count against
your legit (???) copy of XP and you might have to re-activate.
You may want to go to the "D" drive (your old C one) and delete the
swap file to make sure it is never used "pagefile.sys" it is a hidden
file.

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

I suspect your problems are caused by the swap
file being used on the new disk before it was cloned

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

and on subsequent reboot the OS cant find it.

...HTH...

Unlikely.

specifically as possible - maybe that will point a red flag as to
what I did wrong.
1)Old drive jumpered as slave
2)New drive jumpered as master
3)Bios set to boot old drive
4)Run True Image
5)When it says 'clone complete.....press any key to shut down
computer', I did so.
6)I unplugged the old HD
7)New drive is still jumpered as master
8)Set bios to boot new HD, but shouldn't even matter since only one
drive in system
9)No boot, although the NVIDIA boot agent comes up and twiddles
around for a little bit
10) Rehook up old drive and start again
11) Screen comes up during boot saying that Acronis finished doing
somethingorother and boots into XP
12) C drive (old drive) and F drive (new drive) visible in windows
explorer
13) shut down and unplug old drive
14) boot fails again
15) change bios to boot new drive
16) Screen comes up again during boot saying Acronis finished some
process again and boots into XP
17) C drive (new drive - I know by checking the properties and the
size gives it away) is the only visible hard drive in system
18) shut off computer and unplug old drive
19) gave it another try and boot failure again
I guess I'm missing the concept of exactly what I should do when
Acronis says that the clone is complete (even though it obviously
isn't done because it does more things when rebooted.) When I shut
down the computer, should I jumper the new drive differently, or set
the bios to boot differently? I don't even know if it's copied the
MBR at this point. Before performing the clone the program lays out
what it's going to do in 3 steps. Step 1 is clear the drive (ending
in reboot), Step 2 is clone the drive (ending in reboot) and Step 3
is copy the Master Boot Record. I don't know if I'm unplugging the
old drive before it copies the MBR - but if I don't it'll go right
into XP with both drives connected and mess it all up again. What
the heck am I missing? Thanks again to everyone.

17)

wrote in message
oups.com...


This leaves me with the possibility of Ghost- I actually have a copy of
2003 that I just installed, but have no idea how to use it yet. I am
still looking for the simple way to clone a hd and have the damn thing
boot up and have all the programs work on it. Believe me - I'm still
listening with both ears if anyone has any other suggestions. I'll
post back about how Ghost works out. If anyone has any tips for using
Ghost I'd love to hear that as well. Thanks all for the continued help
in this nightmare.

I've used Ghost at least as far back as 2002, probably earlier if it existed
before that point. It has a perfect record with me using disk clones, and I
trust it totally to deliver in an emergency. Sure, it's DOS-based and must
boot from a floppy or CD, and the USB2 drivers have been useless for me--but
it does work and has been very popular for years with many. Firewire
drivers work fine, but I usually use IDE drives, and since the system must
be powered down to connect them (thru mobile racks in my case), then powered
down again to disconnect, it is a minor hassle to operate.

I use it strictly interactively, and the menu items should be
self-explanatory. Basically, I can hit enter three times and get the
drive list, whence I pick the source and destination, then make damn sure it
is the right choice, and finally start the cloning. It does about 1gb/min.
for me using a RAID0 array and several run-of-the-mill HD's from old 20gb
IBM's to more modern drives. One criticism of Ghost 2003 has been that
there is a point of no return, and if you pick the wrong drives for source
and destination you're in big trouble. I haven't tried it, but I assume
interrupting the process at any point renders the destination drive useless.
Before hitting that final button to go, I stare at it and make damn sure it
is what I want.

Another problem is that if you have two like-sized drives in the system, it
may be difficult to determine which is which. In my system, the first drive
has always been the boot drive, the second the next in the boot order (D:
for me), and the third the drive in the mobile rack (not in the boot order).
Perhaps this is the convention, but I don't know for sure. Thus I always
clone from #1 to #3, but I never assume it to be the case and do a
double-take to make sure.

"Anna" wrote in message
...

a. Select the USB 2.0 Support option (assuming you have that capability).

I have never been able to get USB2 drives to work with the supplied
driver(s). As the drivers are loaded it will hang at the prompt every time.
Firewire drivers do work, however. Have you ever run across this problem?

DO NOT BOOT IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE CLONING OPERATION WITH BOTH DRIVES
CONNECTED.

It might be worth noting that you can leave both drives connected in the
Win98SE environment. I did it weekly for years without any trouble, but no
longer use this method in XP.

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
Beemer Biker wrote
wrote

WOW - this thread has really gotten some legs. Thanks to all for the
advice and guidance - I may try the Ghost route, but now using True
Image seems like a personal challenge. I'll lay out what I did as

true image is much easier to use as rod suggested.

I have cloned a number of disks over the years using true image.
There are a number of pitfalls that can cause problems. Number
one is haveing the new disk already formatted and on your system.

Nope, wont make any difference at all.

If the disk is in an external box then you are ok,
but if it is on the pata cable then there is a good
chance that xp will put its swap file on it

Nope, it will never do that.

The swap file can get on there. How it happens I am not sure. When it
*DOES* get on there, that is one of the things can really go wrong. A more
likely scenero is that the GUID's of the disk are the same and when he
booted with the both drives attached, settings on the boot drive point to
the second disk. A side symptom is that it is looking for a swap file in
the wrong place.

Granted, windows does not look for a disk with the most amount of space
and put the swap file there. If, for some reason, there is not enough space
on the primary partition for the swap file, it will find space available
somewhere else or balk. I am guessing that should that happen, then you
will end up with a swap file on a drive other than the boot drive. I know I
have put on an SATA and found the swap file unaccountably on that disk. But
then I had run out of space and the disk was a disaster to start with.

I got on this thread late and do now know what the story is. Maybe it is
a laptop with a hidden partiton that cant be copied and that is the real
problem.

I do know that acronis does not copy any swap file or hibernate files. A
clone of the boot drive will contain information as to where the swap file
is.

I think his problem was caused by first booting the new drive with the old
one there. I think you have mentioned a number of times that "bad things can
happen" but you never say what it is. So do you know? It is one thing to
complain acount a problem and another to help out. One of the things that
can go wrong is discussed he
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;249321


On three occasions I have had the error message "Your system has no paging
file, or the paging file is too small" that is what I meant by zero length
page file. While trying to debug this, occassionally it would not boot at
all. These all occured after using acronis to clone a disk and I failed to
remove the old disk after swapping master and slave. This is not a problem
with acronis, and i first saw a complaint like this on Drive Image 7 (later
Norton Ghost 9). In at least one case i did find the swap file not on the
"C" drive like I thought.

I do not claim to be and expert on this, but the symptom the poster
represented seemed exactly like the one I ran into that left me with a
system that would no longer boot, and when it did I would that that pagefile
error.

more discussion here
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0007.html


and that is where problems start.

Nope.

After cloning the swap file is not present. If you boot your
"new disk" it cannot find the swap file as the original disk no
longer has it (it was automatically put on it because XP does
not know what you are about to do and it sees a new disk that
has plenty of contiguous space and puts the swap file there).

That last never happens.

Usually you see a message "zero length swap file"

Neither does that.

but not always. Sometimes is just wont boot and no message.

Neither does that.

One solution is to use a dos or win98 floppy and rewrite the
mbr. This causes any swap file information to be deleted


in a round-about way: the GUID gets rewritten and windows can find the swap
file since it now know the correct disk to use.
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0007.html


No it doesnt.

and on reboot the OS will find a new place for the
swap file. Just make sure after it boots that the swap
file is on the "C" drive or you will get stuck in a loop.

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

I assume you have the latest TI that can clone the disk,
not the older one that required a TIB file to be booted up.

God knows what this is about.

acronis sold true image and easy migrate way back. If you only had true
image (this would be version 6 I am thinking of) then to clone your disk you
make a backup and store it as a backup.tib file. Then, to create a clone,
you run the true image restore and give it the name of the .tib file and
have it look for a new drive. The best way to backup the "C" drive is to
boot the recovery CD rather than run the backup within windows. If he has
the latest then he doesnt need to do that.


I would delete the partition from the new disk, reboot
and *ENSURE* that the swap file is back on the "C" drive,

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

then clone the "C" drive to the unpartitioned
new drive. This should require a cd boot.

After cloning remove the original C and boot the new drive.
If you want both disks to be on the system you probably
should change the volume serial number of the older "C" drive.

No need, XP does that auto when you put the original
drive back in the system again after booting the clone.

He needs to make sure the new boot drive has the old VSN so it wont count
against him for a reactivation. If XP does that automatically that is fine.
I suggest he record the VSN of the original disk in case either or both of
them get changed. But then, I get tired of calling m$oft explaining I am
not a product key thief.


If you change the VSN of the new boot drive that will count against
your legit (???) copy of XP and you might have to re-activate.
You may want to go to the "D" drive (your old C one) and delete the
swap file to make sure it is never used "pagefile.sys" it is a hidden
file.

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

I suspect your problems are caused by the swap
file being used on the new disk before it was cloned

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

and on subsequent reboot the OS cant find it.

...HTH...

Unlikely.

specifically as possible - maybe that will point a red flag as to
what I did wrong.
1)Old drive jumpered as slave
2)New drive jumpered as master
3)Bios set to boot old drive
4)Run True Image
5)When it says 'clone complete.....press any key to shut down
computer', I did so.
6)I unplugged the old HD
7)New drive is still jumpered as master
8)Set bios to boot new HD, but shouldn't even matter since only one
drive in system
9)No boot, although the NVIDIA boot agent comes up and twiddles
around for a little bit
10) Rehook up old drive and start again
11) Screen comes up during boot saying that Acronis finished doing
somethingorother and boots into XP
12) C drive (old drive) and F drive (new drive) visible in windows
explorer
13) shut down and unplug old drive
14) boot fails again
15) change bios to boot new drive
16) Screen comes up again during boot saying Acronis finished some
process again and boots into XP
17) C drive (new drive - I know by checking the properties and the
size gives it away) is the only visible hard drive in system
18) shut off computer and unplug old drive
19) gave it another try and boot failure again
I guess I'm missing the concept of exactly what I should do when
Acronis says that the clone is complete (even though it obviously
isn't done because it does more things when rebooted.) When I shut
down the computer, should I jumper the new drive differently, or set
the bios to boot differently? I don't even know if it's copied the
MBR at this point. Before performing the clone the program lays out
what it's going to do in 3 steps. Step 1 is clear the drive (ending
in reboot), Step 2 is clone the drive (ending in reboot) and Step 3
is copy the Master Boot Record. I don't know if I'm unplugging the
old drive before it copies the MBR - but if I don't it'll go right
into XP with both drives connected and mess it all up again. What
the heck am I missing? Thanks again to everyone.

17)

Beemer Biker wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Beemer Biker wrote
wrote

WOW - this thread has really gotten some legs. Thanks to all for the
advice and guidance - I may try the Ghost route, but now using True
Image seems like a personal challenge. I'll lay out what I did as

true image is much easier to use as rod suggested.

I have cloned a number of disks over the years using true image.
There are a number of pitfalls that can cause problems. Number
one is haveing the new disk already formatted and on your system.

Nope, wont make any difference at all.

If the disk is in an external box then you are ok,
but if it is on the pata cable then there is a good
chance that xp will put its swap file on it

Nope, it will never do that.

The swap file can get on there.

Nope, not without the user telling XP to put it there it cant.

How it happens I am not sure.

Thats obvious.

When it *DOES* get on there, that is one of the things can really go
wrong.

Nope. If it discovers its gone for whatever reason, it just recreates it.

A more likely scenero is that the GUID's of the disk are the same

They certainly are initially, but wont stay the same for long.

and when he booted with the both drives attached, settings on the boot
drive point to the second disk.

The original drive, anyway.

A side symptom is that it is looking for a swap file in the wrong place.

Nope, when you clone the original, the swap file gets cloned too.

Granted, windows does not look for a disk with the most amount of space
and put the swap file there. If, for some reason, there is not enough
space on the primary partition for the swap file, it will find space
available somewhere else

Nope.

or balk.

Thats all that will happen. You get the usual moan
that there isnt enough space on the boot drive.

I am guessing that should that happen, then you will end up with a swap
file on a drive other than the boot drive.

Yes its a guess. No it doesnt do it like that.

I know I have put on an SATA and found the swap file unaccountably on
that disk.

You stuffed something up rather comprehensively.
Most likely you had already specified that the swap
file should be on other than the boot drive, and then
replaced the drive you told it to put the swap file on
with the sata drive. It noticed that the swap file was
no longer on the drive you told it to put it on, so it
recreated it on that drive, like it always does if you
just deleted it with XP not currently booted etc.

But then I had run out of space and
the disk was a disaster to start with.

I got on this thread late and do now know what the story is.

You presumably meant to say 'do not know what the story is'

Maybe it is a laptop

Nope.

with a hidden partiton that cant be copied and that is the real problem.

Nope. You can clone a drive with a hidden partition fine.
That wont stop XP booting the clone as long as the
original drive is not visible for the first boot of the clone.

I do know that acronis does not copy any swap file or hibernate files.

It does if you CLONE. It doesnt put it in an image file.

A clone of the boot drive will contain information as to where the swap
file is.

And XP will just create one if say you delete the
swap file outside XP, say after having booted
an OS on CD, and then just boot XP again.

I think his problem was caused by first booting the new drive with the
old one there.

Yes, but in this latest detailled list of what he did,
he did try to boot the clone with the old one unplugged.

It isnt yet clear why that didnt boot the clone.

And it appears that it didnt even attempt to boot
the clone in the sense that ntldr was run etc.

I think you have mentioned a number of times that
"bad things can happen" but you never say what it is.

Yes I have.

So do you know?

Yes, the XP boot uses stuff off the old drive and the boot
works fine as long as the old drive is still connected. As
soon as you remove the old drive, you can no longer
boot, because what is on the old drive is no longer there.

It is one thing to complain acount a problem and another to help out.

I've helped out plenty who had that problem
cloning, mostly before you ever showed up.

One of the things that can go wrong is discussed he
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;249321

That isnt the symptom he is getting.

On three occasions I have had the error message "Your system has no
paging file, or the paging file is too small"

Yes, you can get that if the drive is very full.

that is what I meant by zero length page file.

Nothing to do with zero length.

While trying to debug this, occassionally it would not boot at all.
These all occured after using acronis to clone a disk and I failed to
remove the old disk after swapping master and slave. This is not a
problem with acronis, and i first saw a complaint like this on Drive
Image 7 (later Norton Ghost 9).

DI 7 isnt Ghost 9. Ghost 9 is V2i

In at least one case i did find the swap file not on the "C" drive like I
thought.

That would have been because you told XP to put it elsewhere.

I do not claim to be and expert on this,

Just as well.

but the symptom the poster represented seemed exactly like the one I ran
into that left me with a system that would no longer boot,

No its not. You can always boot the clone with the old
drive still visible to XP. The problem is that it will no
longer boot when the old drive is unplugged after you
boot the clone with the old drive visible to XP on the
first boot of the clone.

and when it did I would that that pagefile error.

For a different reason. No one else has reported any pagefile
error when they boot the clone with old drive visible during the
first boot of the clone. And there is no reason why they should,
there will be two pagefiles, one on each drive. And even if the
clone didnt copy the pagefile, XP would just create it on the
first boot with no pagefile. And by definition there must be
enough space for it since it was there on the old drive.

more discussion here
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0007.html

Thats completely mangled. You wont see the drive letters
change if you boot the old drive with the clone visible.

and that is where problems start.

Nope.

After cloning the swap file is not present. If you boot your
"new disk" it cannot find the swap file as the original disk no
longer has it (it was automatically put on it because XP does
not know what you are about to do and it sees a new disk that
has plenty of contiguous space and puts the swap file there).

That last never happens.

Usually you see a message "zero length swap file"

Neither does that.

but not always. Sometimes is just wont boot and no message.

Neither does that.

One solution is to use a dos or win98 floppy and rewrite the
mbr. This causes any swap file information to be deleted

in a round-about way: the GUID gets rewritten and windows can find the
swap file since it now know the correct disk to use.

Utterly mangled. It doesnt work like that.

http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0007.html

Thats a steaming turd riddled with errors.

No it doesnt.

and on reboot the OS will find a new place for the
swap file. Just make sure after it boots that the swap
file is on the "C" drive or you will get stuck in a loop.

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

I assume you have the latest TI that can clone the disk,
not the older one that required a TIB file to be booted up.

God knows what this is about.

acronis sold true image and easy migrate way back.

Correct.

If you only had true image (this would be version 6 I am thinking of)
then to clone your disk you make a backup and store it as a backup.tib
file. Then, to create a clone, you run the true image restore and give it
the name of the .tib file and have it look for a new drive.

What you mean is that it couldnt clone directly, you had
to create and image file and restore that to the new drive.

Thats nothing like 'required a TIB file to be booted up'

The best way to backup the "C" drive is to boot the recovery CD rather
than run the backup within windows.

And here you mean clone, not backup.
You can backup by cloning or by imaging.

If he has the latest then he doesnt need to do that.

He doesnt if he has 7 or 8 either.

I would delete the partition from the new disk, reboot
and *ENSURE* that the swap file is back on the "C" drive,

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

then clone the "C" drive to the unpartitioned
new drive. This should require a cd boot.

After cloning remove the original C and boot the new drive.
If you want both disks to be on the system you probably
should change the volume serial number of the older "C" drive.

No need, XP does that auto when you put the original
drive back in the system again after booting the clone.

He needs to make sure the new boot drive has the old VSN so it wont count
against him for a reactivation.

Thats automatic if you boot the clone
without the original being visible to XP.

If XP does that automatically that is fine. I suggest he record the VSN
of the original disk in case either or both of them get changed.

No need, just dont allow XP to see the
original on the first boot of the clone.

But then, I get tired of calling m$oft explaining I am not a product key
thief.

Then use Pro with a corp key.

If you change the VSN of the new boot drive that will count against
your legit (???) copy of XP and you might have to re-activate.
You may want to go to the "D" drive (your old C one) and delete the
swap file to make sure it is never used "pagefile.sys" it is a
hidden file.

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

I suspect your problems are caused by the swap
file being used on the new disk before it was cloned

XP does NOT put its swap file on the drive with the most free space.

and on subsequent reboot the OS cant find it.

...HTH...

Unlikely.

specifically as possible - maybe that will point a red flag as to
what I did wrong.
1)Old drive jumpered as slave
2)New drive jumpered as master
3)Bios set to boot old drive
4)Run True Image
5)When it says 'clone complete.....press any key to shut down
computer', I did so.
6)I unplugged the old HD
7)New drive is still jumpered as master
8)Set bios to boot new HD, but shouldn't even matter since only one
drive in system
9)No boot, although the NVIDIA boot agent comes up and twiddles
around for a little bit
10) Rehook up old drive and start again
11) Screen comes up during boot saying that Acronis finished doing
somethingorother and boots into XP
12) C drive (old drive) and F drive (new drive) visible in windows
explorer
13) shut down and unplug old drive
14) boot fails again
15) change bios to boot new drive
16) Screen comes up again during boot saying Acronis finished some
process again and boots into XP
17) C drive (new drive - I know by checking the properties and the
size gives it away) is the only visible hard drive in system
18) shut off computer and unplug old drive
19) gave it another try and boot failure again
I guess I'm missing the concept of exactly what I should do when
Acronis says that the clone is complete (even though it obviously
isn't done because it does more things when rebooted.) When I shut
down the computer, should I jumper the new drive differently, or
set the bios to boot differently? I don't even know if it's
copied the MBR at this point. Before performing the clone the
program lays out what it's going to do in 3 steps. Step 1 is
clear the drive (ending in reboot), Step 2 is clone the drive
(ending in reboot) and Step 3 is copy the Master Boot Record. I
don't know if I'm unplugging the old drive before it copies the
MBR - but if I don't it'll go right into XP with both drives
connected and mess it all up again. What the heck am I missing?
Thanks again to everyone. 17)

"Bob Davis" wrote:

"Anna"
DO NOT BOOT IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE
CLONING OPERATION WITH BOTH DRIVES
CONNECTED.

It might be worth noting that you can leave both drives
connected in the Win98SE environment. I did it weekly
for years without any trouble, but no longer use this
method in XP.


There have been lots of comments on this. This need
to hide the "parent" OS when the clone is first run seems
to have come about with WinXP - the same time activation
reared its smarmy head. I've always suspected that it was
a sneak by Microsoft to discourage cloning of its OSes.
We may get a better idea of how low Microsoft will stoop
when Vista finally surfaces and people try to clone it (for
personal backups, of course).

*TimDaniels*

Timothy Daniels wrote
Bob Davis wrote
Anna wrote

DO NOT BOOT IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE
CLONING OPERATION WITH BOTH DRIVES CONNECTED.

It might be worth noting that you can leave both drives
connected in the Win98SE environment. I did it weekly
for years without any trouble, but no longer use this
method in XP.

There have been lots of comments on this. This need to hide the "parent"
OS when the clone is first run seems to have come about with WinXP

Nope, also seen with 2K too.

- the same time activation reared its smarmy head.

Wrong again. And you get the same problem with
corp versions of XP that dont have any activation too.

I've always suspected that it was a sneak by Microsoft to discourage
cloning of its OSes.

Mindless conspiracy theory when its so easy to avoid a problem.

We may get a better idea of how low Microsoft will stoop when Vista
finally surfaces and people try to clone it (for personal backups, of
course).

Doesnt have a damned thing to do with the problem being discussed.

I didn't say the clone mixing problem had anything to
do with the activation *mechanism*, but rather that it
coincided with Microsoft's new efforts at dicouraging
pirating - which is how Microsoft views clones
that can be multi-booted.

*TimDaniels*

Timothy Daniels wrote

I didn't say the clone mixing problem had anything to do with the
activation *mechanism*, but rather that it coincided with Microsoft's new
efforts at dicouraging pirating

No it didnt. 2K has the same problem when
cloning and there is no activation with 2K.

XP Corp has no activation and has the same problem when cloning.

- which is how Microsoft views clones that can be multi-booted.

Wrong again. The reactivation is only necessary
when the hardware changes significantly and a
boot drive change isnt enough to require reactivation.

"Rod Speed" wrote:
Timothy Daniels wrote

[............] pirating
- which is how Microsoft views clones that can be multi-booted.

Wrong again. The reactivation is only necessary
when the hardware changes significantly and a
boot drive change isnt enough to require reactivation.


Microsoft's opinion of cloning has nothing to do with
activation. It has to do with its EULA and its view that
multiple "installations" of its Windows OS with only one
license is pirating. Numerous times in the microsoft NGs,
legions of angry MVPs have insisted that the EULA
prohibits bootable clones because a clone is an
runnable "installation" of an OS, and only one
"installation" is allowed by the EULA under one license.
Of course, I don't agree with that opinion for several
legal reasons, but that is apparently what Microsoft
contends until shown otherwise by a court decision.

*TimDaniels*