Hard Drive Back-up

[Rocky 2]

Can I back up my Hard Drive to an external Hard Drive just in case of a
system crash?
I also have Nortons Ghost. I bought an 80 gig external, because there is
no room in my tower for a bracket and second hard drive. I have an 30
gig internal, with 19 gigs left on the hard drive. Also, I'm running
W-XP Home. Any suggestions !!! TIA

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

Can I back up my Hard Drive to an external Hard Drive just in case of
a system crash?
I also have Nortons Ghost.

SUre you can, and Ghost is a good tool to use for that.

 

[Gene K]

Can I back up my Hard Drive to an external Hard Drive just in case of
a system crash?
I also have Nortons Ghost. I bought an 80 gig external, because there
is no room in my tower for a bracket and second hard drive. I have an
30 gig internal, with 19 gigs left on the hard drive. Also, I'm
running W-XP Home. Any suggestions !!! TIA

Yes you can. I think that external Hard Drives will become the standard for
that purpose as sizes grow and prices decrease. Nortons Ghost is one of the
best known Drive Image programs.

 

[Bob Harris]

You need GHOST version 2003, if the external hard drive is USB or firewire.
Earlier version will not work on such external drives. Also, the drive must
be conncted to the first port of the given type. For example, if you have
USB 1.1 on the motherboard and USB 2.0 on an add-in card, GHOST will only
work with the USB 1.1 on the motherboard. Of course, you could disable the
USB 1.1 in the BIOS, and then the 2.0 add-in card would be the only one seen
by GHOST.

 

[Bob Harris]

The last I chcked, GHOST could could not backup **TO** an NTFS formatted
disk. However, it can backup NTFS to a FAT32 disk, but not the reverse.

 

[Rocky 2]

Thanks for that info. I have usb 2.0 in my Dell system, also have Ghost
2003. If I can't back up my hard drive with Ghost on my external HD,
just what do you use it for? I bought it because the salesman said I
could use it to back up my HD. Just what exactly can I use to back up my
complete HD. Any help appreciated. TIA

 

[VernMan]

Can I back up my Hard Drive to an external Hard Drive just in case of a
system crash?
I also have Nortons Ghost. I bought an 80 gig external, because there is
no room in my tower for a bracket and second hard drive. I have an 30
gig internal, with 19 gigs left on the hard drive. Also, I'm running
W-XP Home. Any suggestions !!! TIA

Besides from the suggestions you got, I want to add that I would
strongly recommend PowerQuest Drive Image 7.
I see Symantec has acquired Powerquest, but it is far easier to use
and IMHO a better tool for yur purpose then ghost 2003. I have both,
and I really prefer Driveimage 7. I bought my copy at Best Buy.
It does support NTFS and writes to CD, DVD, network drives and
external drives. I think it does pretty much the same thing as Ghost
2003, except better and I never had a glitch with it.

http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/

Here's a review at PC World about Ghost 2003:

www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,107378,00.asp

Just my 2 cents

==VernMan==

 

[Rocky 2]

Thanks for your input, and info. I did do a backup of my hard drive with
Ghost 2003, to cds. It took 71/2 cds. But I never checked to see if it
really cloned correctly or not, as I don't know how to check it out. I
also have Nova Backup 7.0 Professional Edition. I did one reformat, and
re-install of W-XP Home, and am not looking forward to doing another
one, as it was a pain in the butt, doing all the updates and program
installs again, it took me three days to get everything back on my hard
drive, and I have much more on the hard drive then before.. Do you know
anything about Nova Backup? Backing up my complete system to an external
hard drive is a < must find a way deal > Thanks again for your input.

 

[Gene K]

Thanks for that info. I have usb 2.0 in my Dell system, also have
Ghost 2003. If I can't back up my hard drive with Ghost on my
external HD, just what do you use it for? I bought it because the
salesman said I could use it to back up my HD. Just what exactly can
I use to back up my complete HD. Any help appreciated. TIA

I have a Maxtor External Hard Drive. It stores files via the FAT32 system
whereas XP Home's system is in the NTFS system. Transfer of file/data
between the two is without problems thus far. I do not have Ghost which is a
Drive Image program. Rather I use a backup program.
There is a good chance that your external has a backup program furnished
along with it as many do. AGAIN Norton's Ghost is not a backup program as
such but rather it is designed [or was] to copy a image of your ENTIRE hard
drive in case you want to go back to that state.

 

[Guest]

Somehow I doubt the following would work:

I have a Notebook (IBM) with a 40GB HDD (Hitachi). I bought an 80GB HDD (Toshiba) of the same form factor (2.5" 9.5mm). I'd like to clone the existing HDD to the new one. I also put the new 80GB into an enclosure with USB 2.0 connector. The notebook recognizes the new Toshiba drive (formated on XP NTFS, as the original is)

I made a backup for my entire system (C: drive) onto another external (Firewire) HDD (Maxtor 120GB), at the end, it (Windows XP Pro) asked for a floppy for recovery disk, which I provided and it said that everything was created successfully.

My next step is to swap drives. I imagine, I need the recovery disk in the A: drive , before I start up my machine again.
Does anyone have experience with this sort of action? Will I be able to restore my entire system and use my 80GB drive from now on?

TIA