Backing up, again

[Paul Breeze paul.breeze@xxxxxxxx]

I don't know if this is of general interest but following some of Robert's recent suggestions I have 
set up a sort of quasi drive mirror under Windows 2000, without using mirroring software, that appears 
to work. I have two identical drives, C: and D:. C: is the system drive and contains everything. I use 
a piece of software called ViceVersa to make a copy of C: onto D:. This is really synchronisation 
software and I run it automatically as a batch job at startup so that D: is updated once each day. 
I also automatically run ERUNT registry backup at startup and keep a week's worth of backups, one 
for each day of the week. All these are on C: and so they are automatically copied to D: each day.

I tested the efficacy of this arrangement by removing the C: drive so that the system was forced to
boot from D: instead. As it stands it will not. Two tricks are needed to get it to boot and both
are most easily accomplished by booting the system using a Windows 98se boot disk (though any other
would probably do.) First it is necessary to navigate via DOS to the latest ERUNT registry backup
folder and run the program there. This will reinstate the missing registry files since these cannot
be copied by the synchronisation software. At this stage the system will probably boot into Windows
2000 from the second disk but it will be unable to find PAGEFILE.SYS and so the boot will never
finish. To overcome this problem it is necessary, which still booted from the 98se floppy, to
command FDISK /MBR from the A: drive. The effect of this is to overwrite the master boot record of
the hard drive so that when it boots with Windows 2000, a new boot record is written (at least tha!
 t is my understanding). With these two strategies, I was able to get my mirror to boot into
Windows 2000 and though I did little testing of the installation, it appeared identical to the one
on the primary drive.

Paul