Both points are untrue.

1) All that is necessary for the destination drive to boot
is for the destination drive to at the head of the
BIOS's hard drive boot order, and that the destination
partition be marked "active".

To put the destination HD at the head of the HD boot
order, enter the BIOS at startup time and manually
change the boot order. Directions will be in the user's
manual.

To mark the destination parition "active" (if there are
more than one partition on the destination HD), use
Disk Manager (rt-clk MyComputer/Manage/DiskManagement).
Rt-clk the graphic of the destination partition and if
"Mark Partition as Active" isn't grayed out, click on it.

2) One can *certainly* boot from a Slave HD. Master/Slave
settings have no meaning at all to the boot loader. All that
is necessary is that the booting HD be at the head of the
BIOS's HD boot order. That can be done in either of two
ways:

a) Enter the BIOS at startup time and manually put the
the HD at the head of the HD boot order.

b) Remove the Master HD, and the Slave HD will
automatically move to the head of the HD boot order.

No diddling with the jumpers is necessary in either
case.

(MVPs: Please test these statement yourselves so as to
stop propagating popular myths.)

Use the usual precautions when booting a WinNT/2K/XP
clone for the 1st time:

Don't let the new clone OS see its "parent" when it
starts up for the 1st time. The easiest way to do this
is to remove the source HD before booting the clone.
Thereafter, you can reconnect the HDs (jumpered
however you wish) and the clone can be booted with
the "parent" OS present - which will be seen by the
clone as just another Local Disk having its own file
structure, and files can be dragged 'n dropped
between the tw HDs' file structures just as between
partitions on the same HD.

If the clone OS is *not* on the HD at the head of the
BIOS's HD boot order, it can still be started if the
the boot.ini file on the booting HD is amended to
"point" to the partition on the HD that does have the
clone OS. IOW, you can implement multi-booting by
amending the boot.ini file. But amending boot.ini and
using WinXP's built-in boot manager to multi-boot is
a topic for another thread.

*TimDaniels*


"Richard Urban" wrote:
> If you want to boot from the hard drive you just copied "to",
> you have to change the cables and jumpers on the drive so
> the drive is the primary master drive. You can not boot from
> the 2nd drive while it is connected as a slave unit.
>
> --
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Urban
> Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User