How to clone a SATA hard disk?

[C.L. Wong]

Hi,

I am using a WD80GB SATA HDD on an AMD64 3000+ system running WinXP
Pro on an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R motherboard, with 512MB of DDR400 RAM. The
HDD is connected to a SATA connector belonging to the VIA chipset, and
not to the additional Promise SATA/RAID chipset that is also available
on the MB.

I wish to make a backup copy of the HDD onto a second SATA HDD and am
wondering how to go about doing it.

When using IDE HDDs, I would use Norton Ghost 2001, connect the
primary HDD to IDE1 and the new HDD to IDE2, boot up with a Floppy
diskette in MS-DOS 6.22 or bare boot Win98, and then run the Ghost
program from the floppy drive. I can use this method to make backup
copies of my hard drives (for archive purposes, in case the original
HDD crashes) or to upgrade to a larger capacity hard drive. It has
worked very well so far with IDE drives.

With SATA drives, a bare boot with a Win98 diskette will not enable
the system to detect and see the SATA HDD, so I do not know how to
clone a SATA HDD.

Is there anyway to clone a SATA HDD, similar to the way I can clone an
IDE HDD?

Thanks for any advice that you can offer!

C.L.

 

[Mr. Grinch]

(e-mail address removed) (C.L. Wong) wrote in @posting.google.com:

Is there anyway to clone a SATA HDD, similar to the way I can clone an
IDE HDD?

Have you read this already? It's all I could find on the Symantec site about
SATA and Ghost.

http://tinyurl.com/2t2v4

 

[Jens]

With SATA drives, a bare boot with a Win98 diskette will not enable

the system to detect and see the SATA HDD, so I do not know how to
clone a SATA HDD.

Why not? This should work even with plain DOS.

JMS

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Have you read this already? It's all I could find on the Symantec site about
SATA and Ghost.

http://tinyurl.com/2t2v4

C'mon. In this day of malign URLs and hostile websites, you're
asking a stranger to connect to a URL he can't read? TinyURL.com
has outlived its usefulness. It's time to go back to long URLs that,
at least, can be read.

*TimDaniels*

 

[C.L. Wong]

Why not? This should work even with plain DOS.

JMS

Oh yes, I forgot to mention. My SATA 80GB HDD is partitioned into 2
logical drives. C: Drive is 60GB in size and is in NTFS format, and
contains all the operating system files. D: Drive is 20GB in size and
is in FAT32 format and I use it only for data storage. Don't ask me
why; the computer shop people just configured the HDD this way

When I did a bare boot with MS-DOS 6.22, I could not see the HDD at
all.
When I did a bare boot with Win98, I could see the FAT32 drive which
is now reported as being the C: Drive, but not the NTFS drive at all.

I have visit the Symantec website and read the article pointed out by
an earlier poster. Does it mean that in order to support SATA drives,
Ghost must be the latest updated version of version 2003, only
available from download from the Symantec website?

I do not have a spare SATA HDD at home to experiment with. I am not
keen to spend the money to buy a new SATA HDD if my Ghost 2001 will
not be able to clone my existing SATA HDD onto the new one.

Thanks for shedding a bit of light on this matter.

 

[Al Dykes]

Oh yes, I forgot to mention. My SATA 80GB HDD is partitioned into 2
logical drives. C: Drive is 60GB in size and is in NTFS format, and
contains all the operating system files. D: Drive is 20GB in size and
is in FAT32 format and I use it only for data storage. Don't ask me
why; the computer shop people just configured the HDD this way

When I did a bare boot with MS-DOS 6.22, I could not see the HDD at
all.
When I did a bare boot with Win98, I could see the FAT32 drive which
is now reported as being the C: Drive, but not the NTFS drive at all.

I have visit the Symantec website and read the article pointed out by
an earlier poster. Does it mean that in order to support SATA drives,
Ghost must be the latest updated version of version 2003, only
available from download from the Symantec website?

I do not have a spare SATA HDD at home to experiment with. I am not
keen to spend the money to buy a new SATA HDD if my Ghost 2001 will
not be able to clone my existing SATA HDD onto the new one.

Thanks for shedding a bit of light on this matter.

FWIW; Acronis Trueimage 7 will boot from the CDROM that's burned as
part of the installation process and see my 160GBB SATA disk. I can
make an image of a NTFS SATA disk and then restore the image to a new
disk. I've done it.

TI is built on Linux.

I backup and restore over 100BM ethernet.

 

[Eric Gisin]

Oh yes, I forgot to mention. My SATA 80GB HDD is partitioned into 2
logical drives. C: Drive is 60GB in size and is in NTFS format, and
contains all the operating system files. D: Drive is 20GB in size and
is in FAT32 format and I use it only for data storage. Don't ask me
why; the computer shop people just configured the HDD this way

When I did a bare boot with MS-DOS 6.22, I could not see the HDD at
all.
When I did a bare boot with Win98, I could see the FAT32 drive which
is now reported as being the C: Drive, but not the NTFS drive at all.

Are you using "fdisk /status" to check for drives? You will not get drive
letters on new drives.

I have visit the Symantec website and read the article pointed out by
an earlier poster. Does it mean that in order to support SATA drives,
Ghost must be the latest updated version of version 2003, only
available from download from the Symantec website?

If fdisk sees both drives, simply use the documented -fni workaround.

 

[dg]

Check your bios settings, the boards I have used have all had 2 different
modes for SATA, I believe they are "enhanced" and "legacy" or maybe "native"
and "legacy" depending on what board it is. Ghost 2003 works well with them
only if I set the SATA controller to "legacy". No problems after that. I
just switch back to "enhanced" before booting back to windows. I have used
giant 250gb drives like this with no problems. Strangely, Ghost works fine
when I have 2 drives setup as a RAID 0 array even though that is just about
as enhanced as a guy can get (ha ha, remembering the "male enhancement" ads
right now).

--Dan

 

[Walt]

I would connect BOTH sATA disks to the Promise chipset, boot,
select Raid 1 (Security), select Create and Duplicate, select
your original disk as the Source, select Yes to start.

All done in BIOS. No OS.

When done, you can either un-do the connections, and go back to
the way you were, or leave it all set up, and have the second
disk be maintained as a constant mirror copy of the original.

 

[Mr. Grinch]

C'mon. In this day of malign URLs and hostile websites, you're
asking a stranger to connect to a URL he can't read? TinyURL.com
has outlived its usefulness. It's time to go back to long URLs that,
at least, can be read.

*TimDaniels*

I don't see anyone holding a gun to his head forcing him to click on it.

I did say it was on Symantec's site. He can find it himself if he wants with
a search for SATA under the GHOST KB.

 

[Jens]

This may depend on the BIOS mode of your SATA drive. If it is set in
BIOS to compatibility mode, DOS will see the drive and can
access/backup the drive sectors. If the drive is in enhanced mode (for
WinXP), DOS may not see it.

But for backup purposes you may switch it to compatible mode in the
BIOS.
In compatible mode, you may only have 4 drives.

Jens Martin Schlatter

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

This may depend on the BIOS mode of your SATA drive. If it is set in
BIOS to compatibility mode, DOS will see the drive and can
access/backup the drive sectors.

If the drive is in enhanced mode (for WinXP), DOS may not see it.

Any idea why that is?

But for backup purposes you may switch it to compatible mode in the BIOS.

In compatible mode, you may only have 4 drives.

Again, any idea why?

 

[zion6]

This rang a bell. In the May issue of Maximum PC magazine , page 68 is
an article called "Serial ATA Image problem" with a mobo with the
865GBF chipset.

Basically it outlines the failure of Drive Image 7 to image even with
command line parameters, Ghost 2003 failure to do so with the 865
controller but sucess with a Sicon Image controller.

The funny thing-the only one that ran without a hitch was Drive Image
2002-a program I am currently having problems with and was the reason
I even found these boards!

==============
Posted through www.HowToFixComputers.com/bb - free access to hardware troubleshooting newsgroups.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I don't see anyone holding a gun to his head forcing him to click on it.

I did say it was on Symantec's site. He can find it himself if he wants
with a search for SATA under the GHOST KB.

I'm not saying you had any mean intent - or might have had -
Mr. G. I'm just saying that more readers would be likely to use the
link that you provided if it weren't put through the forwarding step at
TinyURL.com. I, for one, am quite willing to do a cut 'n past on a
URL, and a long URL would also be less work for you, or any other
poster, to do. IOW, in this day of bad guys on the Internet,
TinyURL.com has outlived its value as a convenience. There is also
the question of value in archiving. What happens if TinyURL.com
goes belly up? Then all the tiny URLs archived at Google become
worthless.

*TimDaniels*

 

[C.L. Wong]

I would connect BOTH sATA disks to the Promise chipset, boot,
select Raid 1 (Security), select Create and Duplicate, select
your original disk as the Source, select Yes to start.

All done in BIOS. No OS.

When done, you can either un-do the connections, and go back to
the way you were, or leave it all set up, and have the second
disk be maintained as a constant mirror copy of the original.

Walt, many thanks for the tip! It seems so simple and straightforward,
yet I never thought of it. I have never played around with RAID
before, so I never realized that this would be such an easy way to
clone a SATA HDD using a RAID 1 array.

My MSI K8T Neo FIS2R M/B's onboard VIA chipset supports SATA and RAID
0, RAID 1. The additonal Promise chipset supports SATA, RAID 0, RAID1
and RAID 0+1.

I went out and bought an identical 80GB SATA HDD, hooked it up to the
VIA connector (the first HDD was already on that chipset connector)
and created a RAID 1 array. It was all done in about 40 minutes, and
then the RAID 1 array worked well on rebooting. I disconnected the
original HDD and ran the computer with the new mirrored SATA HDD, and
it worked perfectly. I even took it off the VIA SATA connector and
tried connecting it to the Promise SATA connector, and it worked
perfectly too! So now I have removed and stored the new cloned HDD as
a backup, in case the original HDD crashed or the OS gets corrupted.

As you rightly said, all done in BIOS and no OS involved!

I suppose the only downside to this method is that you cannot transfer
the HDD contents to a larger capacity HDD, since in a RAID array, the
smallest size HDD governs the size of the image on all the hard
drives.

C.L.

 

[C.L. Wong]

This may depend on the BIOS mode of your SATA drive. If it is set in
BIOS to compatibility mode, DOS will see the drive and can
access/backup the drive sectors. If the drive is in enhanced mode (for
WinXP), DOS may not see it.

But for backup purposes you may switch it to compatible mode in the
BIOS.
In compatible mode, you may only have 4 drives.

Jens Martin Schlatter

My motherboard BIOS does not seem to have the option to choose the
SATA drive as Enhanced mode or Compatibility mode.

Anyway, I managed to create a clone of my original 80GB SATA HDD onto
another 80GB SATA HDD by using the RAID controller and setting up a
RAID 1 array, as I described in another post below. This is for backup
purposes. Of course this method will probably not work if I wanted to
upgrade to a higher capacity HDD. May have to try Acronis True Image 7
in that case

 

[C.L. Wong]

Are you using "fdisk /status" to check for drives? You will not get drive
letters on new drives.

Yesterday, I just booted up with a bare Win98 diskette and only used
the DIR command to look for drives. I could only locate the FAT32
drive and not the NTFS drive, which is probably not surprising, since
Win98 cannot read NTFS drives. Today, I booted up again with a Win98
bare boot diskette and ran Fdisk and Fdisk /status. I can see the
FAT32 drive. Fdisk can also see the presence of the NTFS drive, but it
cannot read the name of this drive volume.

If fdisk sees both drives, simply use the documented -fni workaround.

I have not tried this with Ghost 2001.

Today, I managed to clone my SATA HDD onto a new SATA HDD of the same
capacity by creating a RAID 1 array and then removing the new HDD for
storing as a backup. This method is described in a post below, and
worked very well, but I think it cannot be used for upgrading to a
larger capacity HDD.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I suppose the only downside to this method is that you cannot transfer
the HDD contents to a larger capacity HDD, since in a RAID array, the
smallest size HDD governs the size of the image on all the hard
drives.

Try connecting the 2nd HD as a secondary HD and use Disk Manager
on the primary HD to create another partition on the secondary HD that
is as large or larger than the primary HD and set the new partition to "active".
Then hook them both up in a RAID 1 configuration and try to do the
Duplicate procedure. It *might* use the 2nd partion on the 2nd HD.
Let us know the results.

To set a partition as "active":
rt-click MyComputer, click Manage/Disk Management
rt-click the new partition, click Mark Partition as Active

*TimDaniels*

 

[Mr. Grinch]

I'm not saying you had any mean intent - or might have had -
Mr. G. I'm just saying that more readers would be likely to use the
link that you provided if it weren't put through the forwarding step at
TinyURL.com. I, for one, am quite willing to do a cut 'n past on a
URL, and a long URL would also be less work for you, or any other
poster, to do. IOW, in this day of bad guys on the Internet,
TinyURL.com has outlived its value as a convenience. There is also
the question of value in archiving. What happens if TinyURL.com
goes belly up? Then all the tiny URLs archived at Google become
worthless.

FWIW, I agree with your assessment of the drawbacks of TinyURL. I read about
20 different discussion groups and 6 online forums, and I'm just as likely to
get complaints about using long URLS as using TinyURL. I can't win either
way. I also run a pop-up blocker, antivirus, and windows update. I archive
interesting articles but I also save all URLs in IE Favourites, organized
into folders, and back those up every day. If an article is particularly
important to me, I go into the Xnews archived articles list and edit it (to
add the URL or extra info) and save it again. When I'm searching through
deja, lots of links may show up as TinyURL in articles, but even the full
link are often broken too. Broken links will continue to exist with or
without TinyURL to help them break.

I suppose I should always put both links for the sake of being complete, so
that an archived article has a better chance of being useful. But I have to
be honest and admit that I don't get to worried about making others feel safe
on the web.

Thank you for the explanation, it's appreciated.

 

[Mr. Grinch]

(e-mail address removed) (C.L. Wong) wrote in

My MSI K8T Neo FIS2R M/B's onboard VIA chipset supports SATA and RAID
0, RAID 1. The additonal Promise chipset supports SATA, RAID 0, RAID1
and RAID 0+1.

I went out and bought an identical 80GB SATA HDD, hooked it up to the
VIA connector (the first HDD was already on that chipset connector)
and created a RAID 1 array. It was all done in about 40 minutes, and
then the RAID 1 array worked well on rebooting. I disconnected the

You used the Promise RAID to clone the drive? 40 minutes for 80GB sounds
pretty good.