Can't Mirror C: because of System Reserved

[mixmaven]

Disk 0 contains two partitions: System Reserved (active) and C: Disk 0 is dynamic
Disk 2 is unallocated
Only the System Reserved partition can be mirrored, "add mirror..." on C: is greyed out.
If I mirror System Reserved, I still can't mirror C:

I am guessing if I make C: active, my system won't boot?

Thanks!
-mix

 

[ksiemb]

Disk 0 contains two partitions: System Reserved (active) and C: Disk 0 is dynamic
Disk 2 is unallocated
Only the System Reserved partition can be mirrored, "add mirror..." on C: is greyed out.
If I mirror System Reserved, I still can't mirror C:

I am guessing if I make C: active, my system won't boot?

Thanks!
-mix

Windows 7 uses the System Reserved partition so that it can store recovery options and other information away from the C partition so that malicious parties, or un-knowledgeable users won't destroy the boot partition
The system reserved partition MUST be kept as Active to make Windows 7 boot properly, otherwise it won't boot at all, and copying the files from that partition to C: won't help any either.

What are you using to clone your drive ? Try anything else ?

 

[mixmaven]

I am looking for the best way to mirror the drive on my laptop so that when it fails (and it has multiple times, even with an SSD) I can slide in the mirrored drive and boot up. I have Disk 2 attached to the laptop docking station via an eSATA drive bay.

Maybe I should be asking the best way to do this, instead of trying to figure it out...

Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[hang-the-9]

I think you are talking about RAID maybe which is not what you want to do. You don't want to "mirror" the drive you want to "clone" it, or create an image of the drive to restore to a new one. Although the terms sound the same, they are not. Mirror really only applies to a RAID 1 setup (as in I have a 160 gig drive in RAID1 mirrored with another 160 gig drive, or you'd say I cloned my hard-drive to another drive).

Look at a program called clonezilla, it will allow you to image the drive to an image file, which you can then restore onto a new hard-drive.