Copying hard drives.

[p23185]

When it boots up on new drive the only win screen I can get is blue with Win logo but the three user login buttons are missing. Cannot get past that.

[FatalSaviour]

This thread couldn't have come at a better time.
My father's PC has a crappy 10gig 5400 RPM hard drive at the moment, which sounds like it's on it's last legs.
I'm replacing it with a spare 80gig 7200RPM Sata HDD.
The motherboard doesnt' have onboard Sata so I'm also giving him a spare SATA Controller card. Will I be able to install the card and HDD in Windows on the old installation, then use the Seagate Discwizard software to copy the old drive to the new drive, and use the SATA as a bootable drive straightaway?
Also, will I be able to boot from both drives? i.e. if the copy doesn't work....will I still have all my data on the old drive, and be able to revert to that easily?
Hope this all makes sense....no sleep for 47 hours does strange things to me....
Cheers guys

[mikerr]

Dos based ghost (ghost2003) has problems with SATA

ghost.exe -noide or -fni works on some, but not all SATA controllers.

Anyone know a dos based disk cloner to replace it?
Must be able to resize disk/partiions on the fly like ghost,
and be able to backup/restore to a file or directly to a dvd.

[Paranoid2000]

Anyone know a dos based disk cloner to replace it?
Must be able to resize disk/partiions on the fly like ghost,
and be able to backup/restore to a file or directly to a dvd.

You may find Drive Snapshot worth checking out. It can do backups and restores either from the command-line (it's less than 200K so can fit onto a floppy also) or with Windows itself (though it cannot restore the active system partition - you have to either boot from floppy/CD or create a backup Windows partition too boot into for this).

Its strongest feature is that backups can be run in the background without impact on other activities (unless you're burning DVDs or other time-critical, intensive tasks) which Ghost could not until Symantec replaced it with Drive Image (renaming it Ghost 9.0). It can also mount such backups as virtual drives, allowing you to retrieve individual files via Windows Explorer.

The trial version has time-limited backup and unlimited restore capability so it is ideal for once-off backups.

Another option to consider is Acronis TrueImage which offers similar features (though it uses a Linux-based boot CD for restoring images). More information on this can be found at their support forum at Wilders.

[directhex]

boot a linux live cd, work out the drive assignments (hda, hdb, hdc etc for IDE drives; sda, sdb, sdc, etc for SATA/SCSI drives; a clicky parted fromt end such as gparted or qtparted should help you identify things)

then run "dd if=/dev/source of=/dev/target bs=10M"

i've cloned disks like this before without trouble. you can also use it to write /read disk image files, by using /path/to/some/file instead of /dev/device. you can (de)compress those disk images on the fly with some more command line voodoo.

[Paranoid2000]

boot a linux live cd, work out the drive assignments (hda, hdb, hdc etc for IDE drives; sda, sdb, sdc, etc for SATA/SCSI drives; a clicky parted fromt end such as gparted or qtparted should help you identify things)

It is a good option for those not wanting to spend anything, but it requires you to boot into Linux for taking backups. Ideally, backups need to be as easy as possible (so people do them more often) which is where the Windows-based image backup software shines.

And getting your if= and of= parameters mixed up with dd can be very painful indeed...

[p23185]

I gave up on Ghost and tried WD Lifeguard. It worked and I was able to boot up in the new larger HD, but there are problems of nightmarish proportions. The Restore functino was gond (even WD admits that and has a workaround) and about 1/2 of all my applications will not open cleanly without looking for some mission files of one sort or another. I have decided to trash the 250Gb drive and go back to the 40Gb which is at least "clean and stable for 2+ years". It is not worth the hassle and I will simply add new programs in the future on the secondary drive.