Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with cloning

Cloned drive won't boot

willcosgrove — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:56:43 -0800

How do I get a new hard drive, that's been cloned from my primary drive, to boot as the new primary drive? A few weeks ago I started seeing the signs of my primary drive starting to fail. So I bought a new drive. My old drive was a 300GB IDE, and my new one is a 500GB Sata drive. I used DriveXML to clone my primary to the new drive. After that was done, I took out my old primary and tried to get my computer to boot off of my new cloned drive and it's not working. I can see the drive I want to boot off of in the BIOS, and I tried setting it as the first choice to boot off of (I have 4 drives in my computer). Even with that it's not working. The screen will sit there, then it says "Boot from disk:" or something of that nature, and then an Nvidia and Intel copyright something or other pops up, and then it has a very small error message, and then it just loops over and over (But minus the post. It only posts once.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Sex Selection in Cloning

zzazazz — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:28:12 -0800

Is it possible to choose the sex of a cloned mammal or do you have to create a clone of the same sex at the animal being copied?

Is it possible to remove the DNA from an unfertilized female egg and replace it with the DNA from a sperm cell carrying the X-chromosome?

Houyhnhnm — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:47:49 -0800

Regarding humans, is it possible to remove the DNA from an unfertilized female egg and replace it with the DNA from a sperm cell carrying the X-chromosome (perhaps using a process similar to nuclear transfer)? After doing this, could the egg be fertilized by the sperm of a different male and implanted into a surrogate mother, thus creating a child that is the biological child of two males? Could a similar process be used to create a child from two females? (Obviously their child would be female because there would be no Y-chromosome involved.)

Is it probable that this will be possible/common/affordable once science progresses?
If all of this is indeed possible, why are these processes not commonly utilized by gay couples?

Cloning a laptop hard drive

nomad73 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:40:39 -0800

Replacing my laptop's hard drive. I think I've almost got it but have some questions about the cloning process. I'm replacing the 60GB EIDE main hard drive (C: drive) of my 4 year old laptop with Win XP Home. I've got a new 160GB EIDE drive, a 2.5" hard drive enclosure, and was planning on using XXCLONE to get the job done. All has gone well so far - I've connected the new drive to the laptop via the USB enclosure, and formatted it. Here are my questions:

1) When I formatted the new drive (using the Windows disk management tool) it asked me to pick a drive letter. I picked a random letter down the alphabet - H: - so as not to get confused with the other two external USB drives I've got running. If the idea is to make a clone of my C: drive and then take it out of my laptop and install my new drive, will the drive letter matter? Will the OS simply see the new drive as the C: drive even though I named it H: when I formatted it? If not, how do I go about naming the new drive C: while I've still got to clone the actual C: drive?

2) XXCLONE has the option, when cloning, to make the new drive bootable - which is what I would like to do, I assume. It copies the master boot record and all that. Does that mean that no matter the drive letter I assign to the new drive, when i pop it into my laptop, it will just boot from the new drive and everything will be fine?

3) Other cloning programs seem to either create a bootable CD that you then run while the C: drive is cloned. XXCLONE does not do this - it operates in XP. Will that present any problems in terms of not copying EVERY exact OS file? I'd rather not spend the $ on Norton Ghost or the full version of Acronis True Image, hence why I'm using XXCLONE - free.

Thank you for any advice you may have. Much appreciated.

Cloning iPOD content

zeikka — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:54:43 -0800

How I copy all content from an iPOD to others? I.e. how to clone iPODs? Giving multiple iPODs (Touch) as corporate gifts. They will be full of customized content (music, podcasts, pictures, memos, calendar, contacts, etc.).

How can I clone this easily? I.e. after we've done one, how do we clone 10 or 20 other ones? None of the content is copyright protected, so that's not a problem.

Clone?

weaponsgradecarp — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:47:03 -0800

My google-fu only goes so far: I'm looking for succinct summaries, explanations, and justifications of various religions' opinions/support/criticism on human cloning... Reproductive cloning is my main focus, but therapeutic cloning opnions are also cool...

I've found a few things, such as the adamant opposition by the Roman Catholic Church, and a couple of really cool explanations by various theologians, but I'm looking for any sort of cool differences between subsets of various religions...

Thanks much.

Attack of the Clones!

Glitter Ninja — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 15:58:55 -0800

Help me find the clone pictures I remember from within the last couple of years! I remeber seeing between 3-5, if not more, photoshopped pictures that are like Worth1000.com's "Attack of the Clones" contests.

Looking now, I can't seem to be able to find any of them. I remember in particular one with a girl in a classroom and another with a boy that was done so well as to show him interacting with himself (touching, etc.). One of them in particular had a tutorial with it. Seeing as I am aiming to try something myself this weekend now that my new camera is in, can any other MeFites help me dig these up? Thanks for your help!

Why haven't we cloned extinct animals?

lain — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 12:17:52 -0800

Why haven't we cloned extinct animals? Although controversial, cloning is a very interesting topic. I know we have succeeded in cloning a sheep, cat, and some other "regular" animals, but why haven't we cloned extinct animals? Recently they found soft tissue in a T-Rex skeleton and they tried to extract DNA for cloning, but it was too old. They are also trying to clone wooly mammoths for an ancient park not unlike Jurassic Park (pleistocene park, read up), but they are having trouble extracting DNA from the old frozen mammoth they discovered recently. My question is, why not try to clone recently extinct animals such as the Dodo or the giant-bird Mao? Their DNA is so much younger compared to a dinosaur's, so why not start there?

How can we clone 100 hard drives with a normal PC?

jlstitt — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 08:54:15 -0800

How can we clone 100 hard drives with a normal PC? We have a need to copy entire hard drives (cloning) ... We have been using a Logicube Omniclone 2u, which is a device that can clone 2 drives from one "master". We will be cloning about 100 of the same drive for embedded systems.

Unfortunately, this device is no longer working properly and we cannot afford to buy another (cost is around $1800 USD).

These are just normal 40G, 7200 RPM, IDE drives (all with the same geometry), so it occurred to me that we could probably use a regular desktop PC to do this cloning. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do it because the OS on these hard drives is not a windows system (it's an embedded Unix varient called QNX).

Any ideas?