The Radified Guide gives dire warnings of the consequences of doing this – see p13 of the Guide

http://ghost.radified.com/ghost_4.htm

and it is conventional wisdom that one of the drives must be removed before the computer is rebooted.

Without any confidence that I have any understanding of this, there seem to be two theories: one that windows cannot cope with booting up with two drives attached that have the same volume identifier; the other that windows’ response to the problem is to assign a new drive letter to one of the drives, so that if the computer boots to that drive it boots to a system on a drive in which file paths intended to refer to that drive incorrectly refer to the other drive.  

If so, it would appear that the computer will be ok if it boots to the drive that retains its original volume identifier, but not otherwise.  I sense that it must be more complex than this, and that perhaps the drive mapping function in partition magic could be relevant or at least analogous to the problem.

Anyhow, CMS Products seem to have assured me that where a drive is cloned by BounceBack Pro, it is possible to boot successfully from either drive without removing the other by switching the boot priority in the bios, provided that the drives are sata drives.  I wonder therefore: Would it be possible to do the same where the clone has been produced by Ghost, if the drives are sata drives?  

Likewise, where the original drive has been reproduced on the computer by restoring to another drive a Ghost image of the original drive?  I have actually booted from a series of clones produced by BounceBack Pro 7.0 without disconnecting the original drive or any of the clone drives, by switching boot priorities in the bios, my drives being sata drives.  I am currently having difficulty reproducing the results, but think there is probably some extraneous problem.

I should be most interested if any member can shed any light on whether the the use of sata drives obviates the need to remove one of the two identical drives, or on the exact nature of the volume identifier problem, which is apparently of fundamental importance.  

I should like to be able to back up the system by making clones and test them by booting to them, or alternatively make ghost images of my active drive and then test them by restoring them to a spare drive and then boot to that drive, without in the process having to remove the original drive (and then the clone drive in the former case).