I noticed that there are some posts regarding cloning Vista on here and on another forums but I wasn't able to find any information that really does tell me what should be done.

Cloning Vista for the most part is ok, but what happens when you run dual boot 2000 and Vista?

That's what I have been dealing with as repairing a Vista boot sector will only allow you to boot to Vista, not Windows 2000. Then you run Fixboot from Windows 2000 Boot CD, but now Vista is inaccessible.


This is just for informational purposes only, what you do from here is up to you. In other words use at your own risk.


I have also allowed Ghost to mark my drives though I think it's not necessary.


Here's what I found.


I have used Win98 machine for this at first and later on worked on Vista. Software I used was PhysTechSoft Disk Editor.

When restoring an image Norton Ghost overwrites 1 byte of the 1st sector on the hard disk (absolute sector 0 - actual sector 1);

Before;
http://img171.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ctor00bvd1.jpg

After cloning;
http://img179.imageshack.us/my.php?i...r00bnewhl3.jpg

(that's why you get "Found new hardware - Generic Volume" with XP or 2000 when Ghost is complete). So I changed it to what it was before cloning and haven't noticed anything wrong with my system.


Now the same thing was done with 2000 and Vista PC.

However, now I have to use Phystechsoft Editor from DOS Boot CDROM (which seems to work with SATA drives also).

Using the same drive, we have as expected modified sector;

(marked in red as modified)
http://img176.imageshack.us/my.php?i...llhexedbw4.jpg

Once I changed this both Vista and 2000 booted without finding new hardware.

Now I run this using the different drive but of exact capactiy and model of hard drive;

http://img176.imageshack.us/my.php?i...wodiskspa9.jpg


Again modified the sector manually using Phystechsoft Editor.

Worked again, with both Windows 2000 and Vista, however finding new hard drive was innevitable.

http://img134.imageshack.us/my.php?i...vevistasu1.jpg


So the only thing remaining is to try it with different hard disk.

Well it worked also by modifying those 8 digits. I was able to boot to Windows 2000 right away but to Vista I couldn't. I ran repair on it and that fixed the Vista boot, but also Windows 2000 BOOTED after the repair (this is what gets screwed up if you do it in the old fashioned way - without editing those sectors and simply run quick repair with Vista).

The proper steps were as follows. Boot with Cd rom - select repair Vista. Bypass automatic fix and go to Startup Repair. Click on that and run it. Vista honestly won't even see Windows 2000 anymore. Reboot and off you go to Vista with found new hard drive baloon popups. Same thing will happen in Windows 2000 - found new hard drive. But again it worked.

This is my Windows 2000 - with Western Digital Drive now as opposed to Samsung (that you saw in pictures above presuming that they work)
http://img250.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ewdrivetz6.jpg

This is my Vista with the new drive;
http://img411.imageshack.us/my.php?i...ewdrivege2.jpg

Couple of things to note:

I haven't activated my copy yet. I don't want to actually use it on this PC as it doesn't support it yet. I don't know what happens when you do actually activate it.

When using a different drive - more sectors gets changed but don't try to match up. You will get blue screen.

One thing that possibly could work is to match the partition sizes when Cloning with Ghost (even though the disk is bigger - make them appear the same as with the old drive - by assigning the same disk size).

I think that there might be a better cloning program but what actually has to be done is alter the new boot BCD from within the Cloning program. This I think is simply done for protection, as it would be super easy to swap the drives or clone Vista across different machines.