Yes, you will be able to leave both drives connected, assuming that you purchased the three connector IDE data cable Bev recommended.

No; in order to boot from the drive it needs to be on the black connector located at the end of the data cable.  The IDE controller only supports booting from the master drive.  I'm not sure what would happen if you actually tried to set this up; folks who have a dual boot system, with one operating system on C and the second on D, actually start the boot process from the C drive.  The "stub" on C leads to the boot code for the second OS when the appropriate selection has been made.  If you want both drives to be a "C" drive, you will need to make certain that the first time the cloned drive is booted, it is the only drive connected.  If you have the old C drive attached while booting the new one, you're likely to find that the new drive has been assigned the letter D.  Windows XP keeps track of the drive letters assigned to a drive and doesn't change them unless it finds a duplicate on the system.

I have done something similar to what you are suggesting, but I don't leave both drives in the system.  Instead, I cloned my drive, disconnected the original C and swapped the data cable to the cloned drive, and booted it to establish it as a C drive.  Once I had updated it to anything that was available at that time, I removed the cloned drive and set it aside as an emergency backup.  For day to day back-ups I use a Seagate Free Agent 500 GB USB drive and back up my data directories now and again.

JackShack - Thanks for the response.  (over 4000 posts - impressive!)

Hmm....

I guess it's obvious I'm looking for a quick and easy way to switch back and forth from one clone to another. Maybe I need to change my strategy. Did some googling and found this: IDEX 400 Hard Drive Switch  - which is cool, but overkill and expensive.

Now I'm thinking - is there a simple way to put the two drives in an external rack? Just run a longer 3 connector IDE cable out back of the tower. That way I can easily access the drives to connect/disconnect them as needed.

If anyone knows of a setup like this, please let me know. Or, if it's the case, let me know that I'm off track again... :emotion-15:

I'm afraid that might give you trouble.  IDE data cables are not supposed to exceed 18 inches in length.  The reason is that with all the bits that get transmitted through the parallel conductors, not all of them arrive at precisely the same time if the cable gets too long.  The 18 inch spec was made when the data cable had only 40 conductors; it's my understanding that the 80 conductor cables in common use today would have allowed the spec to be relaxed to about 22 inches, but it was decided not to do that to preserve the error margin.

In any case you will probably have trouble purchasing a good 80 conductor IDE data cable long enough to meet your requirement.  If you could do that, it would still be an experiment and might lead to hard drive errors.

Thanks again.

I'll leave the drives in the tower.

Once I get the cloned drive setup, I'll experiment with the reliability of resorting drive images from an external USB drive.

At some distant point in the future, I'll be sure to get a system that has whatever the ESATA -like solution at that time is.