Windows 10: Clone OS to second hard drive to boot in case of primary drive failure

I've read up on creating dual boot setups, and for a while had a second system on a partition of my only hard drive. Gave that up as unwieldy and installed a second disk for backups. I propose to install a copy of my OS on the new disk as a partition. Couple of questions:

1. When the primary drive fails will it be possible to boot to the second system?

2. Can I clone the entire system partition or will I have to reinstall a selection of software as needed?



:)

 

Windows 10 desktop flashing after booting from backup hard drive

I have an HP p6770t desktop PC with two hard drives. The second hard drive is used as the target drive for the Seagate Discwizard clone function. The second hard drive is thus maintained as a boot-able backup hard drive. The clone function worked in
Windows 7 and the clone was bootable. After cloning the primary hard drive containing Windows 10, I booted from the clone drive, the target backup hard drive. The boot process finished leaving the desk top flashing.

Questions.

1. Is this situation a problem or a "feature" of the Windows 10 anti-piracy policy?

2. If the flashing desktop is a "feature", how is the Windows 10 community going to be able to guard itself against the outages caused by head crashes if it cannot maintain a boot-able, backup hard drive?

The software license terms are found in the Settings area. Paragraph 2E discusses a backup copy. It says that: "You may make a single copy of the software for backup purposes." The single copy was on a hard drive in the same PC. I do not know if
Windows 10 records the serial number of the PC as a part of the installation. My PC is the only user of the software and my PC came from the manufacturer with Windows 7 installed. Everything is legal.

Post Script. I have two hard drives on my PC, primary and disaster recovery (DR) backup. I had copied my primary to my backup prior to Windows 10 upgrade. I ran with Windows 10 for over two weeks and then copied it to my DR backup drive. The Windows
7 is now gone. I tried to boot from my backup drive and I got this problem. Problems then started to occur on my primary drive. Windows 10 recovered a few times and then died.

My PC was dead because of Windows 10!!!! Windows 10 KILLED my PC.


I reinstalled Windows 7 on the DR drive and restored my documents file from an XHD. I kept the primary HD as is with a corrupted Windows 10 so that I can possibly recover the many other software packages on that drive. I purchased another HD so that
I can copy the Windows 7 DR drive to the new HD which then can be used as an OS to reinstall Windows 10 at a MUCH later date. I will download Windows 10 to a DVD and boot from the DVD and use the corrupted primary as the target. I told a friend about
these problems, she just smiled and said that she has a " Mac ".

Windows 10 has been living Hell.

 

When upgrading from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, update fails and I get 80070002-20009 error

Perhaps the Windows 10 upgrade package sees the OS on cloned drives as unauthorized duplications? How many in this thread are booting from cloned drives (including me)?

 

If you choose to do a Clone of your OS HDD to a secondary HDD, not an image file, When the main OS drive fails, you can replace it with the Cloned HDD. It will be a mirror image of he OS drive, programs and all, from the day it was cloned. It will not have any newer files or programs added after the day the clone was made.

 

That`s an excellent idea, do you plan to keep the cloned drive running or will you remove/unplug it from the system ?

 

If you clone it and leave it plugged in it can give problems as you have 2 drives with the same disk signature. With a clone you only have one copy if you image it will compress so you can keep several copies but you would need a drrive to image it back to you can shedule a image so its done auto so it uptodate

 

I would use a ssd to clone to, when you`re done, test the clone then remove it and put it right back in the box and put it in the desk drawer.

As long as your main drive is still running fine you could re clone in the future.

 

Thanks, all. So I can't clone to a partition, it would have to be a whole disk. The word "clone" refers to an entire disk.

But I can install a second OS on the partition as a dual boot. Now, if the primary drive fails, will the pc automatically boot to the alternate OS or is there a method to do so?

 

1. No, you can clone (copy) to a partition.
2. Yes.
3. No but depends on the "failure" & no, not for you. Server versions might have this capability.

Cloning as a backup is not the best solution. Creating images is preferred because they use about half the space, so you can keep more than one. You can create images weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, whatever you choose. I use Macrium Reflect Free.

 

yes, I'm looking at Macrium as we speak.

So, in recap, a dual boot drive will not be bootable if the primary drive fails.


Oh, well . . .

 

Yes, it will, if it has a FAT32 EFI System partition on it (for UEFI computers) and the BCD points to the OS partition on the drive.

 

Far as I can tell I'm Bios, not UEFI. So I will assume it won't work.

 

Yes, you can. In a legacy BIOS system you just have to have a partition marked as active with the boot files in that partition and the BCD pointing to the OS on that drive.

I would suggest you download EasyBCD and read the tutorials on their website. With both EasyBCD and Macrium Reflect it is very easy to make a bootable backup hard drive.

I have a hard drive tray installed in the front of my computer:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...7641-_-Product

I have a self-contained bootable hard drive I can pop into the tray, select it to boot from in UEFI and it dual boots Windows 7 Home and Pro stored on that hard drive. I could just as easily clone Windows 10 from my permanent SSD to the hard drive and boot from it.