how to clone Windows XP installation on a SCSI disk ?

[halcyon]

I've been trying to clone a working Windows XP installation from a scsi disk to another physical scsi disk without success.

My situation is as follows:

Tekram DC-390U2W scsi controller

IBM 27 Gb ATA disk (booting from this, on to the scsi disk, which
contains the actual winxp installation). Shown as C: drive in WinXP

IBM 18 Gb "old" scsi disk (containing Windows XP install partition). Shown as D: drive in WinXP

Quantum 18 Gb "new" scsi disk (contains nothing). Shown as E: drive in Winxp.


I have succesfully cloned the old scsi disk to the new scsi disk.

After this I have used the recovery console and bootcfg command to insert the proper drive signature into the boot drives boot.ini file, so that I can select the new scsi disk as the Windows XP installation to boot into.

All goes well untill I try to boot into the new scsi disk, which has an identical copy of the Windows xp installation from the old scsi disk.

When trying to boot into the new scsi disk, the gui loads up and I get the Windows Logon -screen, except that no single user image is shown. That is, I can't select the user to log into.

Also, pressing ctrl+alt+del (repeatedly) does not bring up the Windows logon dialog (windows 2000 style).

Basically the booting into the new scsi disk windows xp copy just hangs on the logon screen, before I can even try and log in.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? I get no error message.

The problem remains the same, even if:

- old scsi device is attached to the computer (or not)
- new scsi disk has same scsi ID/LUN as the old one (or different)

If I take out the new scsi disk, I can successfully boot back into the Windows XP installation on the old scsi disk.

Any suggestions anyone?

[keeshond]

Sounds like the imaging hardware/software you are using is stripping all the security information from the clone. Normally, this is a good thing, except for the caveat that when you use the 'Welcome Screen' method for logging on, Windows XP does not display the Administrator account. With no other local accounts to display, you have no way of logging on! There are a few ways I can think to get around this.

1: Before you clone the master, disable the 'Use the Welcome Screen' option in the 'User Accounts' control panel (by selecting 'Change the way users log on or off'). This will enable you to use the local administrator account to log on to the cloned installation. I'd recommend running a utility that forces XP to regenerate an unique SID after booting from the clone. I used to run a utility called NewSID for Windows NT 4.0 systems. I'm sure there's a new one out for 2k/XP.

2: Before cloning, you could also disable the requirement to log on entirely by reading this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q315231

You can also use TweakUI to do this, and there's also some obscure control panel applet that you can issue from the Run command (I forget what it is, though). Just remember to reinstate the requirement after everything is running properly.

3: You could use the Sysprep utility in the \support\tools directory of the Windows XP CD. Although it would be a good learning experience, it would be quite a bit of trouble since you would have to reconfigure both the master and the clone to some degree.

4: The cloning hardware/software may have the option to disable it's removal of SID information on the clone. Norton Ghost used to call the utility that performed this action 'SIDWalker'. Since I'm an IT outcast that hasn't been afforded the pleasure of deploying 2k/XP machines, I've been out of the loop. Therefore, a newer version of Ghost may be out that incorporated 'SIDWalker' as a simple option. Then again, you may be using an entirely different imaging solution. I used to deploy images using both Ghost and a hardware duplicator (whichever struck my fancy at the time).

I'm sure there's more. If I think of any, I'll edit this message. Good luck to ya. Of course, all this may be totally off the mark, but it *seems* logical.