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Number   :  1705
Date     :  2002-02-28
Author   :  rotaiv
Subject  :  Re: Full Copy of NTFS XP with XXCopy
Size(KB) :  4


At 02/27/2002 11:45 PM, bobrayx wrote:

>One issue (the main one) for me is the cost of VMWare. The other is
>that I don't really know if I can trust it in case of crash of my
>primary drive.

I think there may be some confusion as to the role of VMWare. This 
application is used to create "virtual machines" that run on top of your 
existing operating system. It's the same concept as emulators that allow 
you to run older and/or obsolete software on your current version of 
windows. All the hardware (such as network cards and hard drives) is 
"virtual" and ties into the real hardware used by Windows 2000. When you 
use the "virtual network card" it actually sends those packets out through 
the real network card. When you access the "virtual USB CD-RW drive", it 
uses the real CD-RW drive (this really worked).

By installing alternative operating systems in VMWare, I am able to 
"simulate" using real hardware in real situations. If you need another 
hard drive, just go to the configuration and select one. Need a SCSI 
drive? No problem, just pick SCSI instead of IDE. All of the data is 
contained in one huge file on my Windows 2000 laptop. This single file can 
be copied to another PC with VMWare and Voila! - you now have XP on that PC 
as well. (Technically, there are couple of small configuration files and 
one "disk" file for each 2 GB drive on the virtual PC - but you get the point).

In other words, I "simulated" copying Windows XP in VMWare - I did not use 
a real PC or real hard drives except for how VMWare ties into my laptop 
hardware. Since VMWare works so well, I am 99.9% confident that anything I 
did in VMWare would have the same results if I were to do it on a real 
system with real hardware.

By far the coolest feature is the "undo" option under the configuration of 
the hard drives. VMWare will log all changes made to the disk and when you 
turn off that virtual session, you have the option to apply or discard the 
changes. This allows me to go into the registry and hack away trying 
something new. If the virtual session blows up or blue screens, I just 
discard the changes and I am back to square one. I try things with my 
VMWare installs that I would never do on a real PC (such as the whole 
cloning exercise).

The beauty of this product is that I can sit in a hotel room with just my 
laptop and have access to fully workings versions of Win98, WinNT, Win2000, 
WinXP and/or Linux without rebooting my laptop once. I hate to keep to 
plugging this product but if you test programs and situations on multiple 
operating systems, you really can't beat this product.

>As to making my cloned version of C: bootable, it might be possible
>but BootItNG says that it is not because of its position on the drive.

I can't remember the configuration of your PC but I think the cloned 
version will work. Have you tried editing the boot.ini file on the 
original C: drive to point to this partition? Providing you have one 
bootable partition with the required boot files, NT boot manager can boot 
any other copy of NT on any other drive and/or partition even if that 
partition is not active and/or bootable by itself. This is how you are 
able to copy three files to an NT formatted diskette and boot NT from the 
floppy.

>I suspect that someone will soon write a DOS program that will clone
>an XP NTFS drive or an XP program that bypass XP's security features
>and copy the system files. Since total drive failures are somewhat
>rare, I figure I'll just wait for one of these to show up.

There is already a DOS based program called NTFSDOS from 
www.sysinternals.com. If you buy the full version, you have read/write 
access to all NTFS partitions on your drive. Unfortunately, this is not a 
conventional "cmd.exe" shell and therefore, will only run specific 
programs. The technology is there so all it will take is for someone like 
sysinternals to allow us to run other applications such as xxcopy.

Another option, for the few, the brave, is Linux. I also have boot disks 
that will allow me to access NTFS partitions with read/write access 
(including the ability to change passwords in the registry). Naturally, 
xxcopy won't work and the whole NTFS read/write capability is clearly 
listed as "experimental". I'm not advocating this to anyone except those 
using VMWare with the "undoable" option selected ;)

rotaiv.