Which Hard Drive Am I Booting From?

[Chernobyl]

I have created an image of my C: and am loading it to my extendable hard drive and I want to boot from that and delete my C: drive and use that for my files and stuff while just running windows and other essential programs like anti-virus from the extendable hard drive.

I have set my BIOS to boot from extendable hard drives first but don't want to format C: until I am sure that it works.

But because it is an image of C: both are identical in every way so I'm not sure which I am actually booting from.

I am still loading the image now but I am asking in advance so when I reboot I know what to look out for.

So an advice on how to tell which has actually booted would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

By the way I am running Vista Ultimate if that changes anything.

[Calvin K]

You can possibly do it but you have to reconfigure some key registry settings in order to do it..but results.extremely slow regardless of what type or amount of ram you have. If I remember right there are about 25 different registry keys that have to be changed for using an USB or flash drive as a bootable media for windows XP.

[Chernobyl]

I have my BIOS setup to boot my extendable hard drive and it is an exact copy (clone) of my C: but it won't boot.

In computer management my C: status is (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Primary Partition) but my extendable hard drive's status is just (Active, Primary Partition).

How do I change the status of the extendable hard drive to the same as that of my C:?

[Chernobyl]

Also in reply to the above post by Calvin K is it the same in Vista? oh and it's a proper extendable hard drive, it it a USB one but it's 630GB. Does that change anything?

[Xan]

I am not sure but i thing the problem is due to after clone when you try to retrieve on c drive that c drive is not active partition so that windows unable to boot from c drive i think there you will need some boot files required that will help to boot from dos to windows ...an that must be done by the application that you use to create clone of disk.