IS there any way to copy your Hard drive windows and all?

[stalkersoftware]

IS there any way to backup your hard drive windows and all the whole C drive and restore it into another drive which could then be used if something went wrong?

[dajogejr]

Yep...
Quite a few products that do that.

Norton Ghost 2003
Drive Image Pro
Acronis True Image

Do a search on Ghost, Image, cloning in this forum. There are quite a lot of threads on it and the software used for it.

[Cyan]

I use nero, and burn a DVD, It's good for re-installs.

It makes a bootable DVD-Rom which guides you through restoring on any partition, so rather than doing a clean install of windows, I simply do one clean install, setup everything how I like it (leave out all drivers for video/mainboard/audio) and back it up, then when something goes wrong, It's a quick 40 minuet trip and I'm practically setup to get going right away.

[stalkersoftware]

Thats like looking for a needle in a hay stag
any how I will give it a shot.

[dajogejr]

I searched for Cloning
Here's what I found:

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/search.p...der=descending

[stccrd]

I've just stumbled across a Linux solution. If you get it to work, its a beautiful thing. It is at this site:

www.partimage.org

Burn the System Rescue CD 2.14.iso onto a disc, and go from there. Man, it is beautiful.

Best of all, it is free!

[crossedup]

The bootable cd link on that site actually takes you here.

http://www.sysresccd.org/

Looks to be very useful. I use Ghost on a regular basis but always looking for more than one way to do the same thing.

93.7 MB download, BTW. Im getting it at a fairly good clip.

[lemmy999]

You could also try Xclone which does exactly that. It'll clone all of your drive (apart from the swap file) onto another drive.

Use google to find a copy

Chris

[The Lodge]

Hey cyan, that nero backitup actually works?

[Bovon]

Currently, I am using Maxtor hard drives.. I downloaded the PowerMax utility version 4.43 which has testing utilities for the hard drive..but also has cloning for the hard drive. It works good, and is simple to use...With Ghost, I believe there are several options, such as image or complete drive clone..which is what I do so that I will have a backup..operational drive ready and waiting. This way requires a separate hard drive.

The Maxtor clone utility does not make an image?..donno for sure.. I just cloned the drive, partition by partition.

[Cyan]

Originally posted by The Lodge
Hey cyan, that nero backitup actually works?

I've used it four times in the last two weeks (I keep screwing up my computer doing sound/audio tests) and It works perfect, every time. It's saved me loads of time.

[RayH]

stalkersoftware What you want to do is known as Disk or Drive Imaging (aka ghosting). The most popular products for this is Norton Ghost, Drive Image by PowerQuest, and Acronis True Image.

The principle of disk imaging is that the partition being imaged has to be saved to another partition or physical drive. In restoration, the file doing the restoring has to restore to another partition or physical drive.

Each product has its own particulars of what devices it will write to and restore from. I use Drive Image 2002 (aka Drive Image 6). It is a DOS based program. The image file has to be saved somewhere that can be read by DOS, like a FAT 32 partition.

Hard drive to hard drive transfer is the fastest transfer rate.

My hard drive is partitioned as C:\ NTFS 10 GB Windows and Programs D:\NTFS 55 GB All Data, incl My Documents, Favorites, and Address Book E:\ FAT 32 10 GB for Drive Image .pqi files

I back C:\ to E:\. I restore from E:\ to C:\. D can be backed up with normal data burning.

Drive Image will compress C:\ to about 50% of the USED portion of C:\. It takes about 1 min per GB (used) to back up. Restore is about half that time.

As my C is about 5 GB used. It takes about 5 mins to back and about 3 to restore. Drive Image is completely menu driven and is very intuitive. It is recommend to use Volume Labels or name the drives. It can be setup in Windows. But it will reboot and run from DOS.

Drive Image can be booted from floppy if necessary and run from there. The files on E:\ are split to be able to be burned to CD via a data burning program. I can restore from CD or even clone a new drive from those CDs. Doing CDs in this manner is more reliable. I don't burn many CDs. It's just an extra protection. Restoring from CDs takes too long.

Drive Image can be found on the internet for about $15-30. It's worth every penny. Although there is a partitioning program in it, I use Partition Magic.

Drive Image 7 is a pain. Stay away from it. It is not a DOS based program. It takes 3 minutes to boot the CD to restore and takes longer to write the files.