As stated it's nothing to do with booting signatures have no effect on that you can change it to anything its only so windows knows what the drive is booting is done via bios not windows. You keep mentioning disk manager you can't change it in there. If you blank the signature windows will just write a new one like it does for a new disk
Let me restate my example.
I clone an original hd1 and call it hd2. I put hd2 in a drawer for safe keeping, and a month later, after adding files to hd1on my laptop, I decide to put those files onto hd2 to make it up to date. I place hd2 in a usb enclosure and connect. Because they are clones with identical sigs, hd2 is not recognized. I research the problem and am advised to go to dsk mgmt rightclick>online and it works, the hd2 is now recognized and I transfer the files from hd1 to hd2, not knowing that I have changed the sig on hd2 and it will no longer boot as a clone if I need it to. I put this hd2 in a drawer for safe keeping and a month later there is a catastrophic failure of hd1, it won't work at all in any way. No problem, I have a clone to protect from just such an occurrence. Unfortunately, I unknowingly changed the sig of clone hd2 so it won't boot now. Hd1 is unusable so I can't find its sig so as to copy it to hd2.
Will win7 repair fix this? Is there a 3rd party software that is designed to recover a disk sig, eg, BCD or other? This is hypothetical for me, only because in real life I resisted making hd2 online until I researched it. Many people have done this and if they try to boot their clone, they are in for a surprise if the don't have the original hd to find its sig. That is why I am questioning to see if there is a fix.
I would never manually modify a clone or backup image to try and get it "up to date".
I would create a new clone or backup image, as needed, to keep it up to date.
If you want to save the signatures before making changes this should work:
Open an elevated command prompt and run these commands to get disk sigs before making changes:
- diskpart
- list disk
- select disk 0
- uniqueid disk
- select disk 1
- uniqueid disk
select each disk and get the uniqueid for each disk sig you want to keep.
You can copy the sig from the CMD window, or save a screen print.
Well easy mate if you only want that external to store stuff then maybe you should make the bootable partitions separate on the cloned drive and partition the drive as much as you like say with this https://www.partitionwizard.com/free...n-manager.html such a really handy tool for doing anything with a drive. For example you could try making the clone partition small and make up others for storage but I am still thinking that having it plugged in when you power on is going to cause issues at some stage of the game.
For my money I would buy another large external drive for storage and use the clone to boot with. The original drive is always there as a safety net.
Many replies, but only alternate suggestions without specifically addressing my question. I'm not sure why no one gets the crux of my question, but I guess I will give up. Thanks anyway.
Well as we have said why this needs to be done in this fashion is a bit of a conundrum because speaking for myself I cannot see any advantage in doing what you want to do because I do understand what you are saying and to me it seems to be making a convoluted method of making sure you have data backed up all the time.
I will again say use the clone to as the everyday drive and keep the original for the back up and I have to say the chances of the clone crashing would be fairly slim unless you did something reckless with it. Make images by all means but you are just making a lot of work for yourself doing it the way you are.
ok, one last time. Of course, everything you said is true. I am not asking permission to do it the way I stated, I am asking if someone has inadvertently changed the signature because they were told to make disk on line in dsk mgt, and didn't know they were changing the sig, and also didn't have the original disk to copy the sig to the clone, is there a repair by win7 disk or 3rd party software to recover the sig and make the dosk bootable again. There are a lot of people being told in forums that offline>online is a quick and risk free solution. It is NOT, unless the sig can be recovered after the fact. I don't know how to state my concern any clearer than that!
See this link
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/...re-collisions/
Thank you, pbcopter. This is what I was looking for. After looking thru the article, it is just convoluted enough that I may not be able to do it successfully if needed. Have you read it and, if so, do you understand it enough to use it? Do you think a win7 install disk repair option would work?
You're welcome. I have read it and believe I could use it if needed but I have not actually done it yet. I believe if an easier way were possible Mark would not have written the blog the way he did. Just my opinion though.
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