Need advice: "ghosting" hard drives

[gsenechal]

Hi

I have a piece of capital equipment that is controlled by two computers
running WinNT4.

I would like to image/ghost the hard drives to back them up and keep
our downtime to a minimum in the event that the files system gets
corrupted (twice now in the past 6 months!).

Anyhow I'd like to outline my plan and ask you to review it and let me
know if it sounds reasonable.

Details:
Drives to be imaged are 2.1GB WD 21100 "Caviar" models.

System doing the imaging is a P4 running WinXP (not professional).
Software (already purchased) Norton Ghost 10.

Planning on hooking up the 2.1GB drives using a USB external hard drive
enclosure such as this one:
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=31389

I'm guessing all I need to do is hook up the 2.1Gb drives in the USB
enclosure, and tell Norton to Ghost the drive to my main system HD.
But someone told me WinXP would try to change/update the file system on
the NT4 drive and that that would be bad.

Any thoughts?

 

[JS]

Years ago a friend had NT4 and if I remember correctly he Ghosted (an
earlier version) an image over the network to another server.
Equally as important is what's corrupting the drives as this is not normal
even for NT4.

JS

 

[Sylvain Lafontaine]

Well, you won't have any problem if you image these hard drives as files on
the backup system. These files won't be touched in any by WinXP. Same
thing for backuping to a CD or DVD medium.

Howerver, if you plan to image (or clone) these hard drives directly onto
new partitions, then obviously WinXP might touch these partitions;
especially if they are not hidden.

 

[gsenechal]

Years ago a friend had NT4 and if I remember correctly he Ghosted (an
earlier version) an image over the network to another server.
Equally as important is what's corrupting the drives as this is not normal
even for NT4.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the machine operator has been turning the machine
off with the giant power switch rather than shutting down properly, so
the corruption doesn't surprise me.

Thanks for the input.

G

 

[gsenechal]

Sylvain,

I appreciate your input thanks.

I was planning on ghosting an image (a single big file as I understand
it) to my WinXP hard drive, then burning that image to a DVD.

So presumably if I get another hard drive failure, I can simply use the
image on the DVD as my source and re-write the image to the HD.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, otherwise no need to reply - thanks for
the help!

Gregg

 

[Sylvain Lafontaine]

Not necessarily a single big file: Ghost will divide the backup into one ore
more files of size 2Gig. It can also directly write to a CD, DVD or USB
hard drive or even the network.

If I remember correctly, when you backup directly to a CD or DVD, Ghost can
make the first one bootable but I'm not sure.

Finally, it's not certain that the failure is coming from the hard drive;
other things like the controller or the motherboard might be at fault here.

--
Sylvain Lafontaine, ing.
MVP - Technologies Virtual-PC
E-mail: http://cerbermail.com/?QugbLEWINF

Sylvain,

I appreciate your input thanks.

I was planning on ghosting an image (a single big file as I understand
it) to my WinXP hard drive, then burning that image to a DVD.

So presumably if I get another hard drive failure, I can simply use the
image on the DVD as my source and re-write the image to the HD.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, otherwise no need to reply - thanks for
the help!

Gregg