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Using a HDD Clone
I have two SATA HDDs on my Win 7 PC. The first is the system boot drive and the second is a clone of the first made with Paragon Partition Manager 11. The clone even has the same signature as the first which has resulted in Windows 7 marking the drive inactive and not assigning drive letters. All of this is OK, if my first drive failed, I could replace it with the clone and Windows should see it as a new first drive, mark it active and assign appropriate drive letters.
But, since any SATA HDD can be used as the boot drive, not just the first in the chain, I have been thinking about how to use the clone as the boot drive as a check. I came up with this procedure and would like to know if it would work.
1. Use diskpart to change the signature of the second drive (The clone.) back to it's original value. Win 7 should then mark the drive active and assign drive letters.
2. Use Win 7 Disk Management to remove the drive letter from the first partition (System Reserved) which normally doesn't have a letter assigned. (Maybe Win 7 won't assign a drive letter to this partition.)
3. Use the PC BIOS to set the second drive as the boot (System) drive.
4. Boot the PC to the clone drive.
Any comments or suggestion will be much appreciated, Jim