What's the best way to clone a hard drive?

Quote from nononsense:

Hi bungrider,

I know what you mean. Norton ghost can drive you nuts. I stopped using it about 1 year ago because of this.

I switched to Powerquest v2i. Much neater. Does everything ghost does. Also gives you incremental capability if you wish. Is less or more the same as DriveImage but DriveImage doesn't do the incrementals. Very fast.

As you said in your previous post, let's hope Norton will not wreck them.

Be good,

nononsense
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http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-07-03.htm#2 See "Drive Image" article.
 
I use Ghost only to have a clean setup of windows each time I would need to reinstall in case of something wrong after installation of an application. For the rest I prefer to make incremental backup on cdrom each week.

Quote from bungrider:

ghost is truly a complete pain in the ass. i've been using it for about 3 years now and after i got it to work (i have an IDE/SCSI mix so the drivers were a total pain to get together) i've liked it. however, prior to going on vacation for the holidays it randomly restarted my machine about 5 discs into an 8 cd backup of my harddrive and i don't know if i've ever been so mad in my life.

i am now looking for alternatives...

that being said, i do use it about once every 1-3 months to create a solid backup of my harddrive, and it is indispensible for making a clean backup of a brand new computer hard drive onto CDs...
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I just use the Windows XP backup. Just be sure to go to "advanced" and select the ASR (automatic system recovery). It will do a complete backup of your hard drive. I backup to a second hard drive.

I've used this to completely reformat and restore to my C: drive without any problem.
 
I'm getting an 80MB WD USB 2.0 external drive. I'll use it to clone my PC's hard drive. My aim is to be able to boot from it if my harddrive dies. It looks like Ghost 2003 might not be able to make an external bootable drive. Has anyone tried it?

It looks like Casper XP can do this.

Thanks,

Chinook
 
I use removable hard drive bays for my C drive and backup drive. During normal operations, I keep a LS-120 drive in the backup drive bay. When I want to make a mirror image of my C drive, I shutdown and replace the LS-120 drive with a backup hard drive. I boot from the hard drive manufacturers free tools disk and make a copy of my C drive. It is as easy as using a floppy disk. It gives me an exact replacement bootable copy of my C drive. I always keep 3 backup copies made on different dates. This has saved my ass many times when I have made changes to my system or software that did not work out the way I wanted. I use WD hard drives; But, I think all hard drive manufacturers have free tools for making a copy of drives. I always use the IDE secondary channel for installing the backup bay. The PC boots from the primary IDE Channel hard drive.
 
Does this work on laptop drives also? I'm planning to buy a new laptop which has the same capacity drive as my desktop (60GB), which has 2 partitions 1 20-GB and 1 40GB.

I'd like to be able to clone my system on the desktop exactly on the laptop.

BTW, my desktop has XP-Pro, while the laptop will come shipped with XP Home.

Is this doable with Casper XP?



Quote from saxon:

I would suggest that you check out a utility called Casper XP. It makes an exact (bootable) copy of your hard drive. I use it all the time to copy to a backup drive, and I've never had a problem.

Here is the C/NET link:

http://download.com.com/3000-2248-10161152.html?tag=lst-0-1

And here is the manufacturer link:

http://www.fssdev.com/

I'm even beta testing for them, and the beta version includes a scheduler, which I have set to run every night at 4:00am.

When I wake up in the morning, I have a fresh, complete copy of my HD on the backup. So if the primary goes down for any reason, I could just replace it with the backup and be rolling again in minutes.

On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 10...really.

saxon
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I can't say for sure - just email them. They're pretty quick to respond and the program works great for straight old drive to new drive cloning. (Thanks again saxon.)

:cool:
 
wavetrader,

Casper XP makes an exact copy of your hard drive. That is great for a backup drive, because if your primary fails, you can just pop it out, pop in the backup, reboot, and your system is back up in minutes.

However, an exact copy is almost certainly not going to work for a new machine, especially two machines as different as a laptop and desktop, since each machine has its own particular set of drivers and registry entries. For the purpose of migrating from one machine to another, perhaps a ghosting app would be better.

Maybe some of the other guys who are more expert about computers could comment.

But for the purpose of creating and maintaining a backup drive for the same machine, Casper XP is flawless.

saxon


Quote from wavetrader:

Does this work on laptop drives also? I'm planning to buy a new laptop which has the same capacity drive as my desktop (60GB), which has 2 partitions 1 20-GB and 1 40GB.

I'd like to be able to clone my system on the desktop exactly on the laptop.

BTW, my desktop has XP-Pro, while the laptop will come shipped with XP Home.

Is this doable with Casper XP?
More...
 
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