Seagate, WD backup utilities faulty?

[larry moe 'n curly]

Are the disk backup utilities written by OnTrack and included with
Seagate and WD drives reliable?

Original drive: ATA/100 120GB WD or Seagate
Destination drive: ATA/100 120GB WD or 160GB Seagate

Each drive set to Cable Select, separate cable for each drive.

Mobo: ECS K7S5A Pro w/ Athlon XP1800+ or Soyo 440BX w/ 300 MHz Celeron

HD controller: Built into mobo (for K7S5A Pro) or PCI card (Promise,
Silicon Image)

I booted to the WD or Seagate CD-ROM and used their partition copy
utilities, but every time I tried to copy the boot sector, problems
were reported with the same three files (files corrupt after the first
25-50% -- always the same way, but file sizes correct). Scandisk and
surface scans of the source drives showed no errors. Different
combinations of the motherboard and PCI HD controllers were tried. I
made an image copy of the source with Norton Ghost 2001, but the same
errors occurred with the WD and Seagate copy utilities. The results
didn't change when I tried the Windows versions of the Seagate and WD
copy utilities

Another oddity I noticed was that the partition was copied very slowly,
less than 300 Mbytes/minute. Norton Ghost was much faster, and even
with the 300 MHz 440BX mobo it reported 850MB/min
(clock time seemed to agree with this).

 

[dreamtheater_142]

Are the disk backup utilities written by OnTrack and included with
Seagate and WD drives reliable?

Original drive: ATA/100 120GB WD or Seagate
Destination drive: ATA/100 120GB WD or 160GB Seagate

Each drive set to Cable Select, separate cable for each drive.

Mobo: ECS K7S5A Pro w/ Athlon XP1800+ or Soyo 440BX w/ 300 MHz Celeron

HD controller: Built into mobo (for K7S5A Pro) or PCI card (Promise,
Silicon Image)

I booted to the WD or Seagate CD-ROM and used their partition copy
utilities, but every time I tried to copy the boot sector, problems
were reported with the same three files (files corrupt after the first
25-50% -- always the same way, but file sizes correct). Scandisk and
surface scans of the source drives showed no errors. Different
combinations of the motherboard and PCI HD controllers were tried. I
made an image copy of the source with Norton Ghost 2001, but the same
errors occurred with the WD and Seagate copy utilities. The results
didn't change when I tried the Windows versions of the Seagate and WD
copy utilities

Another oddity I noticed was that the partition was copied very slowly,
less than 300 Mbytes/minute. Norton Ghost was much faster, and even
with the 300 MHz 440BX mobo it reported 850MB/min
(clock time seemed to agree with this).

Hello, Larry.
I don't know what's the cause of your problem, as I've never had such
problem. Because for backup I always use good tested Acrons True image
[http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/].
It works even 3 times faster than Ghost. True Image has very
good-looking intuitive windows wizard, that makes utilization
convenient.
It saved me thousand times: when I need immediately restore system,
which was crashed by accident.
So to my experiance it's the most reliable sofrware.