Back Up Entire Hard Drive

[Guest]

I currently have an external hard drive (Drive Letter H) through the FireWire.
I'd like to copy the entire C drive (Hard Drive contents, Windows 2000,
programs, registry and everything) to the external hard drive (Drive Letter
H).
In case of emergency, I just would like to swap the hard drive and start the
computer.
Is this possible using the Windows 2000 - Systems Tools - Backup?
Selecting C & System State & My Documents & My Network Place - Admin$ & C$?

Has anybody tried this method?

Best regards,
Hiro

 

[Yor Suiris]

No that will not do as you wish. Using backup you will end up with a Backup
"file" on your External drive and not a "copy" of your hard drive. Then
inorder to do a restore you would have to load an O/S to first be able to
read the Backup "file" and restore it.

First to do as you wish you must be able to boot from the external drive
(not sure if you can as I've never tried), but I doubt it will show as a
boot option in the machines BOIS. If you can boot to it, then you need to
"mirror" the external and internal, Let the replication finish. Then break
the mirror and try to boot from the External. You may also have to edit the
boot.ini to point to the external drive.
If you can not Mirror to the external, then you will need a second machine
with same O/S. Put external and the internal you want to copy in the second
machine and use an utility that will copy the Security setting as well as
the data to create a duplicate of your drive (i.e. Secure Copy by Small
Wonders). OR some Imaging software. Then try booting from the external.

But I do not believe it will work, as I said I doubt you can get the BOIS to
see the external drive as bootable.

And what a waste of an external drive. Load it up and leave it on the shelf?
I would buy a second hard drive, Mirror it with the first. Break the Mirror
and store the second drive till needed. Of couse the second drive will be
out of date, unless you stick it back in and mirror again once in a while.

Better yet just setup the Mirror and leave it alone till one of them fails
then switch to the other drive, buy a new drive mirror that wait for the
next one to fail, buy a new hard drive, mirror it, then.... well and so on
and so on. You are only down as long as it takes you to edit the boot.ini
and reboot.

Also this works much better and easier if your have Hardware RAID. The MS
software RAID takes a little tweaking to get the second drive to boot up
after a failure.

Good Luck.

 

[Guest]

Dear Yor Suiris:

Thank you for your quick e-mail.
I'd like to ask you a few more questions. When you say, "mirro", does it
mean creating and/or duplicating the copy of the Hard Drive (drive letter C)
onto the external hard drive (drive letter H)?
How can I accomplish this task?
It will be greatly appreciated if you could lead me to an appropriate
direction.

Hiro

 

[PA20Pilot]

Hi Hiro,

.........When you say, "mirro", does it mean creating and/or duplicating
the copy of the Hard Drive (drive letter C) onto the external hard drive
(drive letter H)? How can I accomplish this task?

Quite often mirror means keeping a second hard drive plugged in that's
an exact copy of your main drive. If the main drive goes bad, like
throws a rod or something, you'll have the second drive as a direct
replacement.

The problem with that approach, as I see it, is that you're also subject
to screwing up both drives at the same time, like a virus would be
copied to both drives making the backup damn near worthless.

The approach I use is using Nortons Ghost to clone/copy my main hard
drive weekly, or just before I think I'm risking my main drive with a
questionable update or some such thing. The main drive clone is kept in
a removable hard drive tray that disconnects by turning a key. There's
no chance of my accidently messing up my second drive between clonings
as it's not even running.

If my main drive fails for some reason, it's a simple matter of
switching the jumpers on the second drive to master, and I'm good to go.
It's kind of like having an exact duplicate of my main drive as a spare,
as current as the last time I ran Ghost.

Ghost sells for about $30 or so on ebay, and there are several other
programs other people may tell you about that work along the same lines.

---==X={}=X==---


Jim Self
AVIATION ANIMATION, the internet's largest depository.
http://avanimation.avsupport.com

Your only internet source for spiral staircase plans.
http://jself.com/stair/Stair.htm

Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA)
Technical Counselor

 

[Yor Suiris]

Mirroring means that the system uses two harddrives with excatly the same
data on both. The two drivers appear as one to the Operating system. Thus
you will only see a C:\ drive, No H:\. If you use Software RAID (not as good
as Hardware) then Disk Manager will display the second disk but the Two
still show as one in My Computer.
PA20Pilot is correct viruses and other software problems will be dupicated
as well. But you should be proactivily watching for those things all the
time. Of cousre downside to Imaging is the Time to recreate the harddrive.
With Mirroring the down time is only as long as it takes to reboot. With
some high end RAID controlers there is No Down Time at all.
It is all a question of $$ and how important down Time is to you.

 

[PA20Pilot]

Hi Yor,

.........Of cousre downside to Imaging is the Time to recreate the
harddrive.

That's right. As I understand it though, imaging is more like a
compressed version of your drive, or maybe just a file that needs to be
reinstalled to recreate your drive.

Since I use Ghost cloning instead, I can switch the bios to boot from my
clone and be running again as fast as that. Or, I can switch the drives
jumpers and be running in less than 5 minutes using the clone drive.
Since it's a clone, I don't need to copy anything at all. It's really
more like having an exact duplicate of my drive.


---==X={}=X==---


Jim Self
AVIATION ANIMATION, the internet's largest depository.
http://avanimation.avsupport.com

Your only internet source for spiral staircase plans.
http://jself.com/stair/Stair.htm

Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA)
Technical Counselor

 

[Mario]

I just installed a second hd, and ghost 9.0. I, too, want to be able
to do incremental backups of my hd to the 2nd hd, and in case of
catastrophe switch cables and boot up from the 2nd hd.

After reading up on the subject in groups, I thought I could do it. I
installed everything and did a complete backup of my c: drive to the
2nd hd. Ghost recognized two pieces of my c: drive, so I backed them
up seperately.

Now I should mention that if I look at the 2nd drive, all I see are
two files, which are the backups created by Ghost. I didnt believe
with 2 files I could just switch cables and backup. Well guess what,
it didnt work. I switched the cables to the 2nd hd, and it gives me a
blank screen and a 'boot failure'. Can anyone help me? I wanted to
be able to switch cables, in the event of an emergency, boot up from
the 2nd hd, and continue on as if nothing happened. But, of course,
only to the point of the most recent backup. Is this possible?

Thanks
Mario

 

[John John]

You need to "mirror" the drive, not back it up. Back ups are packed in
backup files that only the backup software that made the files can
understand and restore. This is probably explained in details in your
software documentation. I don't know how the new Ghost software runs
but in days of old, in case of a catastrophic failure you could install
Ghost in DOS mode and completely restore the drive from the backup
files. It's called "Bare Metal Restore".

John

 

[Yor Suiris]

Didn't I say that at the start of this tread?

You need to "mirror" the drive, not back it up. Back ups are packed in
backup files that only the backup software that made the files can
understand and restore. This is probably explained in details in your
software documentation. I don't know how the new Ghost software runs but
in days of old, in case of a catastrophic failure you could install Ghost
in DOS mode and completely restore the drive from the backup files. It's
called "Bare Metal Restore".

John

 

[Mario]

OK then, I guess some folks didnt know what they were talking about.
So a mirror it is. Can you recommend any software that might do this
for me. Note however, I do not want a true mirror, in the sense
everything I do, every moment, is mirrored. I would just like a daily
mirror, or maybe even a weekly mirror. That is, it will update the
mirror incrementally, but in the event of a catastrophe it can be
bootable.

Or maybe, if the above can not be achieved, as that is my first
choice. Then I guess I can make the 2nd drive bootable, that is
install XP, and maybe even ghost. That way in the event of a crash I
can boot up, but I just do a restore. Is this doable, if so, how? Is
it as simple as installing XP on the second drive? thanks for any
help

Mario

 

[Leythos]

OK then, I guess some folks didnt know what they were talking about.
So a mirror it is. Can you recommend any software that might do this
for me. Note however, I do not want a true mirror, in the sense
everything I do, every moment, is mirrored. I would just like a daily
mirror, or maybe even a weekly mirror. That is, it will update the
mirror incrementally, but in the event of a catastrophe it can be
bootable.

Or maybe, if the above can not be achieved, as that is my first
choice. Then I guess I can make the 2nd drive bootable, that is
install XP, and maybe even ghost. That way in the event of a crash I
can boot up, but I just do a restore. Is this doable, if so, how? Is
it as simple as installing XP on the second drive? thanks for any
help

I know a number of people that use Ghost to image servers to single
files on another server. This lets them install the new disk, boot from
the Ghost floppy, restore the image file, and be back up and running in
about 50 minutes.

The only other reliable method, and you said you don't like it, is to
use a "Mirror" and do tape/ghost incremental backups to another location
- you can use ghost walker to restore the specific files you want as
needed.

 

[John John]

That is where I defer from others and hardly EVER recommend or suggest
"mirror" or "ghosting" software. Here is how I tell which, if any of
these you need.

1- You need mirroring software software if your minute by minute by
minute, if not second by second by second data is so critical that to
lose mere seconds may cause catastrophic loses. Cases where to use:
911 services, telcos, the launching of the space shuttle, operations
that process so many transactions that backups cannot be made because
the data changes faster than you can make backups, ie: Visa, Mastercard,
Interac, or a corporation that takes 86,400 orders a day. Mirroring
software is not invoked, it's always on. What does it do? It writes 2
copies of everything that you do, always all the time, instantly. It
mirrors your activities on another drive as it happens. Usually used
with hot swap hardware.

2- Ghosting software. Are you deploying 500 workstations at once? How
about 100? 50? Maybe 10? or 5? How about 2? You aren't deploying any
workstations? Then you don't need ghosting software. Period. Oh sure
if your desktop fails you can ghost your drive back to your pc or to
another pc. What pc? The same, or same make? Same CPU? Same hardware?
Same peripherals? Ghosting might work... or not... most likely not.
Unless of course you are ghosting the same pc, to the same pc. But
ghosting is not the best to use for that. Difficult to keep up to date
and use incrementally.

3- Backup software. The most prevalent, versatile and useful software
for those who don't need mirroring or ghosting software and used always
by those who use the aforementioned. It will completely restore a
completely broken OS and data files to the latest backup. On the same
pc it will do "bare metal" restores. On a new or different pc it will
"insert data" where you want it inserted or "restore" data to a new or
different pc. Not quite so with mirrors or ghosts. It is the easiest
to use "incrementally". You don't need to ghost when you have good back
up software, but the newer ghosting software does both... more or less.
Read your software documentation.

You say that in case you have a failure of sort you could open your case
and change the drives around and reboot the pc to windows 2000 as if
nothing happened. Then ghost your W2k installation onto your second
hard drive and test it, it should work. As to the rest well it's a
cumbersome undertaking. With good backup software AND good backup media
anyone can restore his or her pc to last state almost faster and more
reliably than you can switching the drives around.

It matters not as to have it bootable. In the case of good backup
software you can restore from DOS or a minimal Windows installation.
The backup software will restore everything as it last backed it up.
You MUST however with NTFS and NT based systems make sure that you make
backup recovery or emergency recovery disks. Without these disks there
is hardly if any but the most expensive software that can do restores.
The security (SAM) as well as other NTFS files are needed by the backup
software before it can restore.

What to use? Well how much do you want to pay and how critical is your
data? Ghost CAN do what you want. What do I use? Veritas software.
In a home or less demanding application try Stomp BackUp MyPc, the baby
brother (or sister) to Veritas, and works pretty damned well.

John

 

[Mario]

Hello again, this may be a bit off topic for this thread but hopefully
someone has an answer for me. I found the structure I want to use but
I still dont know enough for it to work properly. Hopefully somebody
can help.

Let me describe what I have and did again. My c:\ drive is 40gb, and
under the 'computer management' utility it shows two partitions. A
small FAT partition (31 mb) and the larger NTFS partition (39 gb).
The backup drive is 120gb and I split it into 2 NTFS partitions. The
d: drive is 80gb, and the e:\ drive is 40gb.

I used norton ghost 9.0 to backup and save an image of my c: drive to
the e: drive. Once this is all done, I disconnected my c: drive, and
made the large drive the primary drive, making sure all jumpers are
set properly. I installed a version of XP on the d: drive(now the new
c:\ drive) so that I can boot the machine up if I disconnect the
original c:. That works fine.

In the event of a hard drive failure on my original c:\ drive, I
wanted to be able to disconnect the drive, and make the secondary the
primary, and boot up to make sure everything is working fine. If I
got past this point, I wanted to restore the image on the old e: (new
d:\) to the old d:\ (new c:\ with XP). I assumed the restore function
would overwrite everything on the new c: but I didnt think that would
matter because I could boot up when the image is restored. Well I
tested this and did the drive restore using the norton recovery cd,
and when I tried to boot, it gave me an error. The file 'hal.dll' in
system32 directory is missing or corrupted. Not the case, as I copied
a clean version of this file and it still does not work.

Can anyone help? Thanks

Mario

 

[f/f george]

Hello again, this may be a bit off topic for this thread but hopefully
someone has an answer for me. I found the structure I want to use but
I still dont know enough for it to work properly. Hopefully somebody
can help.

Let me describe what I have and did again. My c:\ drive is 40gb, and
under the 'computer management' utility it shows two partitions. A
small FAT partition (31 mb) and the larger NTFS partition (39 gb).
The backup drive is 120gb and I split it into 2 NTFS partitions. The
d: drive is 80gb, and the e:\ drive is 40gb.

I used norton ghost 9.0 to backup and save an image of my c: drive to
the e: drive. Once this is all done, I disconnected my c: drive, and
made the large drive the primary drive, making sure all jumpers are
set properly. I installed a version of XP on the d: drive(now the new
c:\ drive) so that I can boot the machine up if I disconnect the
original c:. That works fine.

In the event of a hard drive failure on my original c:\ drive, I
wanted to be able to disconnect the drive, and make the secondary the
primary, and boot up to make sure everything is working fine. If I
got past this point, I wanted to restore the image on the old e: (new
d:\) to the old d:\ (new c:\ with XP). I assumed the restore function
would overwrite everything on the new c: but I didnt think that would
matter because I could boot up when the image is restored. Well I
tested this and did the drive restore using the norton recovery cd,
and when I tried to boot, it gave me an error. The file 'hal.dll' in
system32 directory is missing or corrupted. Not the case, as I copied
a clean version of this file and it still does not work.

Can anyone help? Thanks

Mario

Delete the file from the C; drive and then restore it from the backup
drive and try and reboot. If that does not work then you have a
failure in your backup system. Were you doing ANYTHING else while the
backup was running, that is usually not a good idea.

I just did a search on the net for hal.dll and found this web page:
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_haldll_missing.htm

There are MANY others!

 

[Guest]

This is what I think is a reasonable solution. I use Iomega hard drives and
included, free software. (Both Ghost and Automatic Backup software is
included.)

1. Carve an external drive into at least two partitions. One for ghosting
and one for daily/weekly/wheneveryouwant/ backups
2. Ghost your entire hard drive to the ghost partition, created in step 1.
3. On the bootable c: drive, install the Iomega Automated Backup software.
4. IMHO, software wizard walks you through the entire process and backup to
the bakup partition created in step 1 above.
5. In case of catastrophie, install new c: drive, ghost from the ghost
partition, then restore most recent backup of files.
6. One must remember to re-ghost the bootable drive after every major update.

This entire solution costs about $130 for the hardware and software at
CompuUSA and took me about 2 hours to get a valid backup solution.

I have also had to completely recover before and using this solution, was
completely recovered and back in production in less than 2 hours.