Cloning a XP Hard Drive

[JCH]

My HD appears to be on the verge of failing and I want to install a new HD
before it's too late. I need to clone my existing HD to the new drive and
then have the new one be my master boot drive. Can some one give me a
procedure or point me to a web site that will make this as painless as
possible? I'd appreciate it. My main concern is making sure the new HD will
boot up as "C" drive and not some other designation. I'll be using
DriveImage. Thank you.

 

[Willit]

Have you ever spent ten hours putting all your OS,
programs and settings back in and any Data files you have
created with them. If you downloaded them you will not
have a key to install or a way to get a replacement copy.

A copy is a copy. A Image is a image. A
clone/copy/backup is bootable, it has everything your
original drive has,OS, Programs, Email, Address Book,
Data and Registry. You can update it at anytime, any part
of it. Casper XP does that from the windows platform. I
have had Image files for years, the problem with them is
it's a whole file. You cannot make changes to them, you
cannot access them, you have to restore them. Some will
boot some won't. A image file cannot be written to a
smalled disk unless you can change the partition size to
fit the smaller drive. Lets say you have a 40gb main HDD
with 10 gb of data, you cannot put a image of it on a 20gb
disk. If you're up-grading to a larger drive wouldn't it
be nice to have the old drive for a back-up

I have all the backup programs made I think, Drive Image,
Ghost ( 3 versions ), Drive Wizard, Copy Commander, Drive
Back , TrueImage etc. I mentioned Casper-XP because
someone in here made a post about it , I said what the
heck, just another $39.00, I love it. It works so easy and
I have made 30 copies and they all booted, proof enough
for me.
Buy a second Hard drive $69.00 these days and a good
copy/backup program to make a clone. XP-Casper is one.

http://www.fssdev.com/products/ $ 39.00 make the clone
and then un-plug the power to the drive if you want.

Want to test drive a Demo for 30 days. It has some
features disabled.

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10161152.html?
tag=lst-1-8



XP is the most stable of all the windows, but it has the
highest corruption rate i have ever seen. I have Win 3.1,
Win 95 Win98 that never been re-installed , XP machines
have been done 10 times. At some point you have to wonder
what your time is worth.

I mentioned the second drive because the backup/clone is
made at IDE speed. Change two plugs and your back running
with 5 min of down time. Just the filters on my mail
program make it worth it to me.

 

[Jeff Malka]

From all I read about image copies and file copies I have sort of decided
this would be a good approach for me. But, because I am not an expert in
this I wonder if this makes sense to the gurus on this list or if I made an
error that will come back to haunt me:

1. Divide my HDD into a 12-15GB partition for "system and program files" and
another for Data files.
2. Make an image copy of the System/Program partition to a separate HD (I
have a large external HD connected by USB)
3. Use Xcopy or similar for "file to file" (not image) copies of the Data
partition to the external HDD for backup

A. In case of disaster: bootup from the image software's own program (Q:
does CasperXP boot up separately if the PCs HDD will not bootup?) and
restore the "System/Program" Partition from the USB HDD.

B. If I just need to restore some Data files, I just copy those files back
from the external drive.

The reason I am using a separate external HDD is (because I have one) so
that I can access it separately in case the PC will not Bootup. Also I can
use the removable USB HD to backup both my 2 home PCs in separate
partitions.

Does this seem reasonable?
Does CasperXP bootup from a CD even if the PC will not boot up to XP?

Thanks.

 

[Alex Nichol]

My HD appears to be on the verge of failing and I want to install a new HD
before it's too late. I need to clone my existing HD to the new drive and
then have the new one be my master boot drive.

What I use is BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com ($35 shareware -
30 day full functional trial)

Download, to its own folder, extract from the zip, run the bootitng to
make a boot floppy.

With the new drive plugged in as slave/secondary, boot the floppy,
Cancel Install, entering maintenance, then click on Partition work.
Highlight your C:,Copy, then on left select the new drive (HD1) and
Paste.

Now click on 'View MBR' and in it highlight the entry for this new C
partition and click the 'Set Active' Click 'Write Standard MBR' and
Apply. Also make a check that this partition is in the same place in
the table as it was if you do a View MBR on the old one - if not use the
Up or down to correct it.

Close out, swap the disks to make the new one the one that boots, and
reboot into XP.

 

[I'm Dan]

From all I read about image copies and file copies I have sort of decided
this would be a good approach for me. But, because I am not an expert
in this I wonder if this makes sense to the gurus on this list or if I made
an error that will come back to haunt me:

1. Divide my HDD into a 12-15GB partition for "system and program
files" and another for Data files.
2. Make an image copy of the System/Program partition to a separate
HD (I have a large external HD connected by USB)
3. Use Xcopy or similar for "file to file" (not image) copies of the Data
partition to the external HDD for backup

A. In case of disaster: bootup from the image software's own program
(Q: does CasperXP boot up separately if the PCs HDD will not
bootup?) and restore the "System/Program" Partition from the USB
HDD.

B. If I just need to restore some Data files, I just copy those files back
from the external drive.

The reason I am using a separate external HDD is (because I have
one) so that I can access it separately in case the PC will not Bootup.
Also I can use the removable USB HD to backup both my 2 home
PCs in separate partitions.

Does this seem reasonable?
Does CasperXP bootup from a CD even if the PC will not boot up
to XP?

Your plan for data files is fine, so let's set that aside and discuss
only the OS (with apps) partition. CasperXP is a poor choice for a
disaster recovery strategy. Its strength is making *copies* of an OS
partition which will subsequently boot on their own (e.g., upgrading a
hard drive). It's a weak choice for backup/restore purposes, and does
not make images. It is a WinXP app, so won't run from a CD and only
runs from a working installation of XP. If your XP installation dies,
CasperXP doesn't run either.

What you want is an image program. They are designed to save a
compressed image of your entire OS partition that can later be used to
restore the original partition. Note an image is not a copy (so don't
call it an "image copy"), it's rather like a zipfile on a grand scale.
One advantage of an image file is that it can be significantly smaller
than the original partition -- if your 10GB partition is half full, you
could probably store it in a 2.5-3GB image file. Another advantage is
that an image file (once it's created) can be stored on any file storage
medium, including CD/DVD or another HDD partition. Note, however, that
the imaging program itself may or may not be able to do that directly,
so it might be a two-step process, but the point I'm making is that it's
an ordinary file (albeit, a large one) that can be moved around later.

You want an imaging program that can run from DOS or a floppy boot when
you need to restore, and ideally you'd like it to create/restore image
files directly to your USB drive. Note that the former requirement has
a bearing on the latter -- USB drives work great in Windows, but can be
a problem accessing from DOS. I don't use a USB drive, but others
report good results with Ghost 2003 and BootIt NG (which recently added
USB2 support).

FWIW, I prefer storing images on CDRs rather than a USB drive. They're
compact, easy to store, and by their nature permit me to save multiple
generations of backup image files rather than counting on just one
backup.

 

[Jeff Malka]

Thank you.

Actually, I was planning to use Bootit for the system/program partition
backup. I just thought to ask the question here because you appeared so
knowledgeable - and I was right! )

One confusion:

FWIW, I prefer storing images on CDRs rather than a USB drive. They're
compact, easy to store, and by their nature permit me to save multiple
generations of backup image files rather than counting on just one
backup.

I have a CD writer, so storing the backup images of the "System/Program"
partition would be possible. However, it would seem to be difficult to copy
a 2-3 GB compressed image file onto one 7-800 MB CD - unless one used
several CDs per backup - assuming that is possible for one large file. (I
have Nero 6)

Also, I heard that re-writeable CDs are less dependable than one time write
CDs. Does that really matter for these backup purposes?

Thanks.

 

[I'm Dan]

I have a CD writer, so storing the backup images of the
"System/Program" partition would be possible. However,
it would seem to be difficult to copy a 2-3 GB compressed
image file onto one 7-800 MB CD - unless one used several
CDs per backup - assuming that is possible for one large file.
(I have Nero 6)

Also, I heard that re-writeable CDs are less dependable than
one time write CDs. Does that really matter for these backup
purposes?

Yeah, that's the rap against CDs, is that modern Win versions require
multiple CDs for a full backup. Ghost, DriveImage, and BootItNG can
span multiple CDs during the creation process, but I don't use them that
way. I create the image on another HDD partition, but have the image
split into CD-sized chunks as it's being created (I use DriveImage 2002,
but Ghost can do this, too). Then I burn the pieces onto CDRs. During
restoration, I run DI from floppy and insert each CDR as the program
calls for it. For the imaging programs that support DVD, using a DVD
burner should makes things even easier as you wouldn't have to swap
disks.

My feeling is that CDRWs are less dependable than CDRs, but whether they
really are or not is irrelevant, IMHO. Using/reusing a CDRW is no
better than using a USB drive (and slower, because of the multiple-disks
involved). The benefit of write-once CDRs is that you don't reuse them,
so they naturally become alternate generations of your OS image.

 

[Jeff Malka]

Thanks. I'm learning all the time.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have a CD writer, so storing the backup images of the "System/Program"
partition would be possible. However, it would seem to be difficult to copy
a 2-3 GB compressed image file onto one 7-800 MB CD - unless one used
several CDs per backup - assuming that is possible for one large file. (I
have Nero 6)

If using BootitNG you can make the image direct to a set of CDs on any
ATAPI CD burner available (or I now use a DVD-R - the whole system
partition on a single disk, which would hold about 7GB original data
after compression). Or more realistically, I make the image in the
first instance onto a set of files in a separate partition, fairly often
- choosing a file size compatible with CD - and use their auxiliary
program BINGBURN (in the free tools) to burn a DVD or CD set from them
now and again

 

[Alex Nichol]

My feeling is that CDRWs are less dependable than CDRs, but whether they
really are or not is irrelevant, IMHO. Using/reusing a CDRW is no
better than using a USB drive (and slower, because of the multiple-disks
involved). The benefit of write-once CDRs is that you don't reuse them,
so they naturally become alternate generations of your OS image.

This would be one of the less fraught uses of CD-RW, in that the entire
disk would be being used - where they really give trouble is in packet
written modes (the usual one with them) where the directory tracks are
getting over-written a very large number of times, and then fail, with
nasty results. But at the price of write once media now, there is no
real need to spend the considerable extra on RW. I recently bought a
stack of 50 DVD-R disks, each enough for an image of a sensible size
system partition - at a price of just about a dollar each (plus tax and
shipping)