[JayDiz]

So, all I want is a safty net for my current XP Pro installation. I want to go to Vista, but if it blows me up, I just want to go back to my HDClone of my current XP build. Reading through these posts and the FAQ's, I have learned that Miray needs to provide some better help for us "not-so-technical" folks.

I have a 320GB RAID SATA setup. (2x 160GB SATA's). Windows XP Disk Manager see's just one drive that has 300GB of space because of the setup.

First thing most people need to understand is a what is a drive, a disk, and what is a partition?
--The physical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is that silver box in your PC that can be as large as 250GB.
----The first physical HDD is called DISK 0
----(In my situation, I have 2 HDD's that appear to be 1 320GB HDD to my OS)
--This HDD can now be divided into several smaller sized drives.
----This is done mostly because folks want to put their Windows OS and Program files on the C:, and then put their actual data and files on a second drive in case there is a problem with the C: and if they have to re-format, they will not lose their data.
--In order to accommodate multiple drives on a single HDD, you must first divide the HDD using a Partition. This can be done using FDISK, or Windows Disk Management.
--The first partition is called the PRIMARY partition.
----This partition is the active partition that the PC boots from
----This is the C:
----This is generally the only drive on the primary partition.
----This partition contains the MBR (Master Boot Record) which tells the PC to boot from this drive.
--The second Partition is called the EXTENDED Partition.
----Inside this EXTENDED Partition, you can create multiple LOGICAL drives, such as a D:, E:, etc...
----Each of these logical drives is seen as an individual drive by the OS.

Hope that helped a bit....

I simply want my C: cloned (My Primary Active Partition). I do not want to disturb my D:, E:, F: or G: as these all have my data on them. C: is just the OS and Programs. Here is my setup:

320GB HDD
Primary Partition is 25GB and contains the MBR and C:
Extended Partition is 275GB and is divided into 4 Logical drives
D: - 100GB
E: - 100GB
F: - 60GB
G: - 15GB

Here are my options:

Drive --> Drive: This will copy my entire 160GB Physical Disk Drive 0 and pay no attention the Primary Partition, or the beginning of the EXTENDED Partition. It will simply do a bit-by-bit copy and essentially be useless in a SATA configuration unless I had 2 separate disks. Although this should copy the MBR to the next disk and make it bootable, I would doubt it because I have a RAID. Perfect for 1:1 copy of a 30GB to a 200GB....but watch out for missing 170GB of space afterwards.

Drive --> Partition: This will copy my entire 160GB Physical Disk Drive 0 and again pay no attention to the Primary Partition of the beginning of the Extended Partition. In my scenario, my second physical Hard Disk Drive 1 would be the Partition to copy to, but it is all part of the Extended Partition created back on physical HDD 0.
I would think this would be beneficial for a backup. I would like to know if the entire Drive copy will retain the MBR and save it all on the target Partition and should it need to be copied back to the original Drive, it would become bootable again?

Partition --> Drive: Here we have some potential. Take your active Primary Partition and copy it to a backup drive, like a USB 2.0 external drive.
I would think this would copy the entire Primary Partition including the MBR and you could then copy it back if you needed to revert to a previous state as in my situation.

Partition --> Partition: I would think this is the exact same as the above above using less space than an entire drive.

My questions from all of this are:
1) Will Partition to Drive contain every bit I need including MBR and other bootable info?
2) If I need to restore, do I simply restore the drive back to the Primary Partition?

I hope this helps some folks and I look forward to any help I can get!

[Alex]

To answer your questions:
1) Partition to Drive will only copy the partition payload data to another drive, this excludes MBR/partitioning info. Expect this to change in some future version, as there will be options to include arbitrarily portions needed for various restore functions.

2) You can restore a previousliy saved Partition-to-Disk back into a Partition with no loss of data given a) a bootable target disc and b) the correct Partition layout on the target disc. If you only try out some new feature on the current OS installation and have stored the old working version away on some disc, restoring this version back should be no problem at all.

[Conny]

Hello!
I have copied disk to disk and wonder if there is a way to get to the lost memory off 100 gb?

[Alex]

You have two options of recovering those lost 100GB: a) create another partition with the remaining space (use the computer management from your control panel to do this) or b) resize the last partition (this can be done using the diskpart-command, but can only be performed on partitions that are not system partitions, i.e. you must not have booted from it).