Hard Drive Cloning

[PantherPaul]

Does anyone have experience with hard disc cloning using software like Nortons Ghost, Instantrecovery or any of the others? My hard disc is starting to falter and I really want to keep whats there there. I have Norton Systemworks 2001 (off of ebay no books) which has Ghost but when I looked into it it seems to only want to make bootup disc. How do these programs work? Do I need to have the new disc in the machine but not attached to the motherboard? Is it a copy and paste? Which is the best to use in your opinions.

 

[Y2Buddy]

If it were me, I would install a fresh software load onto your new drive. It will run like the day you bought it, probably even better, depending on the drive you choose. If you are able to have 2 drives at once, you can copy over everything else, like applications and games, but if you have the disks, it's best to install them too. Incase you don't, put your system folder on a CD so you can always pull extensions from it. If you decide to just copy the entire contents, be sure to make your new disk bootable, but like I said, I don't recommend it. I believe the programs you are referring to are more back-up/emergency restore type of situations. I don't allow Nortons anything on PC's, but that's me. With Macs, it used to be a must have, but not so much anymore.

And I'm sure this goes without saying, be sure your bootable floppy has your CD drivers.

Off the subject note here: For those who have 1,000 fonts installed on your computer, be sure to use a Font Manager application such as Suitcase or ATM. This will allow you to turn them on and off when you want. Having that many in your system folder slows down your applications because it's forced to read each and every one when it launches and when you access them. You can keep them on your hard drive, just not in your system folder.

 

[Superfluous_Nut]

Will your cloned hard drive have a soul?

 

[PantherPaul]

Thanks Y2Buddy

another question in the same neighborhood. I have 2 hard drives currently in system a 20 gig Western digital (C:/) a 40 gig Maxtor (currently unassigned) a CD player, and a burner. A friend helped me set up the PC with the 20 gig inline sharing a IDE with the CD Rom, the Burner along with the 3.5 floppy sharing an IDE and then the 40 gig having a IDE all to itself. I have 4 IDE's in the PC. Any how He configured the 20gig as a master and the 40 gig as well a master. He said the master term was for the IDE it was on. I called bullshit and was backed up by the fact the PC doesn't necesarily recognize it, yet and have been getting error messages. Any how after 3 weeks of messages and me beig away from home and not being able to deal with it when you boot it up I got a hard disk error and it stops dead in the water. I came home from working on the road (with Duke Energy) and disconnect the 40 gig, reboot a couple of times and everything looks fine. My guess is the 20 gig C: drive is ok just that both hard drives were fighting to see who was the true master. What order would you hook the 5 hardware items (2 hard drives, CD RW, CD player, and 3.5 floppy) to 4 IDE's. When I tried to configure the new 40 gig as the D drive it asked me to insert the operating system. The manual didn't address it being a slave or slave master drive. Just a master. It also came with one jumper. Any ideas?

 

[Y2Buddy]

There can only be one master Grasshopper. Peddle this snatch to get some Yen, I mean snatch this pebble from my.....oh

Yea, one master. In Device Manager, can you assign the drive as D:? I'm not sure, but I think you have to fdisk to assign slave or master. That will erase the drive I believe. If you can't use the computer with both drives at the same time, disconnect the 20 and use a bootable floppy.

 

[mathmajors]

There can be as many masters as there are IDE controllers, and thus only one master per controller. I'd set up the two hard drives on one controller - one master, one slave (since you're booting with the 20GB, make it the master). The jumper you have should allow you to set one of the drives (40GB) as slave. I'd set the burner and the player on another controller - one master, one slave - according to how the burner documentation recommends. The floppy drive should have it's own controller.

Master and slave settings cannot be configured with FDisk. FDisk is for creating partitions on drives.

Symantec Ghost works great for disk cloning. We use it to deploy workstations and for disaster recovery with servers.

 

[PantherPaul]

things getting clearer

before had a hard disk and CD player on one IDE, Burner and 3.5 on another. I will take the 20gig (C: ) inline with 40gig (second in ribbon), player then burner in next (in that order) and lonely 3.5 all to itself. Boot it up and see what XP thinks of it. Will XP then recognize both hard drives and assign C and D to them? Burner and player E, F? What will I have to do in either BIOS or setup (god I hope very little) BIOS scares me. Format the new slave 40 gig? Where do I do that at?

 

[Y2Buddy]

Oh yea Math, I could not remember where that button was. It's not an everyday thing, that's fer sure

 

[mathmajors]

I've only dealt with XP Professional, so I'll reference it.

It doesn't matter what XP assigns after you get all the hardware sets because you can reassign them as you wish. In NT/2000 there's a utility called Disk Administrator, but I'm not sure what it is in XP. The one thing you want to be careful about is marking anything besides the system partition (usually the C: partition) active. You don't want to mark the D: partition active if you don't have the operating system installed there.

 

[mathmajors]

Oh, yeah. If you're going to Ghost any XP, make sure your Ghost version supports it. I don't know about the home use versions, but you gotta have Ghost Enterprise 7.5 to clone XP.