Does XP Prof. support software mirroring?

[Torrey Lauer]

I was thinking of upgrading my PC's harddrive to a serial ATA Western
Digital Raptor drive (10k rpm), but my PC doesn't have a serial ATA adapter.
I see tigerdirect.com has a PCI adapter card with one external and one
internal serial ATA port for $29.99. So, I was thinking of buying the
serial ATA PCI adapter card an the WD Raptor drive.

My question is that I don't want to have to reload the OS, applications,
etc. Does XP Prof. support software mirroring? I was thinking that if it
did, I could set it up for the drives to mirror each other, and then just
disconnect the old IDE drive.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

--
Torrey Lauer
Modern Travel Services
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Rainbow Sky Travel
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[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Windows XP does not have a native software-based mirror
option. In order to configure a mirror, you'll need to setup a
RAID configuration. This requires two identical hard
drives, a motherboard with RAID or a RAID controller
card. Then you must install Windows XP from scratch.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

Get Windows XP Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/protect/windowsxp/choose.mspx

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:

| I was thinking of upgrading my PC's harddrive to a serial ATA Western
| Digital Raptor drive (10k rpm), but my PC doesn't have a serial ATA adapter.
| I see tigerdirect.com has a PCI adapter card with one external and one
| internal serial ATA port for $29.99. So, I was thinking of buying the
| serial ATA PCI adapter card an the WD Raptor drive.
|
| My question is that I don't want to have to reload the OS, applications,
| etc. Does XP Prof. support software mirroring? I was thinking that if it
| did, I could set it up for the drives to mirror each other, and then just
| disconnect the old IDE drive.
|
| Thoughts? Suggestions?
|
| --
| Torrey Lauer
| Modern Travel Services

 

[Haggis]

I was thinking of upgrading my PC's harddrive to a serial ATA Western
Digital Raptor drive (10k rpm), but my PC doesn't have a serial ATA
adapter. I see tigerdirect.com has a PCI adapter card with one external and
one internal serial ATA port for $29.99. So, I was thinking of buying the
serial ATA PCI adapter card an the WD Raptor drive.

My question is that I don't want to have to reload the OS, applications,
etc. Does XP Prof. support software mirroring? I was thinking that if it
did, I could set it up for the drives to mirror each other, and then just
disconnect the old IDE drive.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

--
Torrey Lauer
Modern Travel Services
moderntravel DOT net

Rainbow Sky Travel
rainbow sky travel DOT net

your new drive should come with software to do the transfer for
you...or...the software is available to download from the WD site

 

[Torrey Lauer]

Haggis,

So, you are saying, that by using the software from WD, I should not have to
reload Windows or any applications, right?

--
Torrey Lauer
Modern Travel Services
moderntravel DOT net

Rainbow Sky Travel
rainbow sky travel DOT net

 

[R. McCarty]

Just add the SATA Controller to your IDE based XP install before
you convert over. That way you'll only have to clone the drives and
just reboot.

 

[Malke]

Haggis,

So, you are saying, that by using the software from WD, I should not
have to reload Windows or any applications, right?

The normal procedure is:

1. You buy a new hard drive and connect it in your computer as slave.
2. You run the utility that came with the drive if you bought retail or
that you downloaded if you bought whitebox.
3. The utility copies your old drive (in the machine as master for now)
to your new drive. Then you move the new drive to master. If you want,
you can keep the old drive, format it, and use it for extra storage.

*BUT* - This assumes the two drives are the same in terms of how they
are connected to the motherboard. Since your old drive is IDE and your
new drive not only is SATA but attaches to the system with a pci
controller card, I don't think this is going to work for you. The
problem will be that if you did a fresh install of XP with a drive on
the controller card, you would have needed to provide drivers for the
controller card (F6) during setup. Those drivers won't be available on
the copy the drive utility makes, so I doubt that Windows will boot. It
probably won't even see the SATA drive. If you want to confirm this,
contact the tech support of either the hard drive or the pci
controller.

My *guess* is that you will have to back up your data and do a clean
install, but that is *only* a guess on my part. I would make the
necessary phone calls to tech support to find out for sure.

Malke

 

[R. McCarty]

Malke - Not too long ago I dropped my SCSI Ultra-160 for SATA-1.
Since the Motherboard controlled the SATA, All I had to do was do a
image recovery to the new SATA drives and toggle the Intel BIOS to
a different Boot Device/Controller.
If he buys a SATA card, it should have BIOS control on it. I would
think that if he adds the SATA controller to his existing IDE setup that
he could get by with a "Clone" - as long as on the first boot with only
the SATA's he enters the PCI Card setup and configures his devices.
He might have a problem if his motherboard BIOS can't handle boot
from a alternate controller. Best I remember, most of those SATA
card BIOS setup/scan routines run after the mainboard one. Either way
I would probably take a System Image before starting the switch over.

 

[Torrey Lauer]

What software do you recommend to do a system image?

--
Torrey Lauer
Modern Travel Services
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Rainbow Sky Travel
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[R. McCarty]

Well there are several top contenders.
Symantec/Norton Ghost
Acronis True Image

Those 2 utilize "Hot" imaging done from within Windows. Personally,
I use a DOS based version of Drive Image (Father of Ghost). I have
a Bootable CD-R that contains the program. I image the partitions to
a workspace drive, verify the contents then on a regular basic burn
the image to DVD-RW and then about every 3-4 weeks make a DVD
R disk to keep as a "Reference" copy.

You cannot have TOO many backups/images.

The key to imaging is always check the option for verify. This makes
a 2nd-pass verifying the image is an exact match of the source drive.
There is nothing wrong with the Hot Imaging versions, I just prefer to
do mine outside of Windows. To image my System partition takes
under 3-Minutes and I'll continue to use it until a new version of NTFS
forces me to upgrade.

Usually, you can download a trial version and then compare results.

 

[Torrey Lauer]

Can I use the imaging software to image the existing HD, then use the image
to put onto the new SATA drive? Or won't work?

--
Torrey Lauer
Modern Travel Services
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Rainbow Sky Travel
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[R. McCarty]

Will work fine w/ one exclusionary statement. If your setup contains
multiple partitions then recovery won't allow you to resize. So if
your new SATA drives are larger and you want to expand those
partitions to larger sizes you'll need Partition Magic or BootITng -
two of the best Disk Management tools.
*Why Symantec doesn't offer Partition Magic and Ghost together
is a colossal marketing error.

 

[Torrey Lauer]

Thanks for answering my questions, and thank you to the others as well for
answering and helping me.

I appreciate it.

--
Torrey Lauer
Modern Travel Services
moderntravel DOT net

Rainbow Sky Travel
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[R. McCarty]

I'll correct myself. I can't speak about Ghost, but Drive Image will allow
you to increase the destination partition size at recovery time. So since
Ghost is Drive Image 7+, I would assume that feature is still in place.
There are other regular posters here who use both TrueImage & Ghost
perhaps one of them can confirm destination resizing.

 

[Kerry Brown]

I'll correct myself. I can't speak about Ghost, but Drive Image will allow
you to increase the destination partition size at recovery time. So since
Ghost is Drive Image 7+, I would assume that feature is still in place.
There are other regular posters here who use both TrueImage & Ghost
perhaps one of them can confirm destination resizing.

True Image offers three options when cloning a disk. "As is" - maintains
partition sizes, "Proportional" -automatically uses the whole new disk
making partition sizes proportional to the old disk, "Manual" - user
specified partition size. Manual works very well for HP or Dell machines
that have a recovery partition. You can keep the recovery partition the same
size and use the rest of the disk for your OS partition.

I'm not sure about the PATA to SATA change though. That's a Windows issue
and depends on the motherboard chipset. If it's an Intel non-Raid SATA
controller it works but you may have to edit the boot.ini file. I have done
it with an Intel D915GMHL board. Once it boots into Windows you have to
reload the Intel chipset drivers to get UDMA working. I haven't tried other
chipsets. If it's a Raid chipset I think you'd probably end up doing a
repair install adding the drivers via F6.

Kerry

 

[NobodyMan]

Well there are several top contenders.
Symantec/Norton Ghost
Acronis True Image

Those 2 utilize "Hot" imaging done from within Windows. Personally,
I use a DOS based version of Drive Image (Father of Ghost).

Drive Image was not 'the father of Ghost.' Both products existed
simultaneously for a number of years before Symantec bought the rights
to Drive Image from PowerQuest.

 

[R. McCarty]

Yep, O.K. It was just a "Subtle" attempt at humor to show how
the longstanding Ghost product was supplanted by Drive Image.
I'm aware of the lineage of each, and have used both for a long,
long time.

For not denoting Humor/Witticisms/subtlety =
Subtract 3 points from my scorecard for today.

I really hate having to explain/elaborate on my postings.