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Hard Disk Failure

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6 replies

by cal

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Hard disks fail. To protect against such a failure, I would like to, in Windows XP, clone the hard disk before it fails. The clone must be bootable.

I've tried Norton Ghrost, Disk Copy, PC UPGrade Commander, all to no avail.

Any suggestions.

Thanks,

Cal

6 replies

by mrbill-

If you are using XP Pro I think you could install a second drive and set up a RAID 1 drive array. This would give you redundancy of your boot drive. Though you lose efficency by using 2x the space. I'm not sure if it is as fast as a non-raid drive, should be ok for biz apps but gaming might suffer.

by cal

will study what is needed to make certain my drive is backed up and bootable.

Thanks,
Cal

by lordinfidel

While Raid 1 (mirroring) is great in the event of a physical drive failure. It will not save you in the event of an OS failure.

Now compund the fact that he would be creating the raid set at the OS level instead of at the hardware level. This causes an automatic performance hit using the OS to perform a raid function. And if you are using IDE drives tack on an extra penalty hit.

Also with Raid, (any level), make sure that you are using disks my the same manufacturer. prefabably the same make/model/size. Reason being is that different manufactures have different block sizes that they use. Raid is a testy creature and you may get some unexpected results down the road when mixing different drives.

by cal

I've looked at Raid and decided I wanted a better solution. Next suggestion is Ghost, which I have tried and failed. Will try again. Many Thanks, Cal

by lordinfidel

I use ghost all of the time. the trick is to clone the drive to another drive.

with 2001, simply create a ghost boot disk.
shutdown. install a second drive. (I prefer to slave it off of the second controller)

Then boot off of the floppy. You want to clone disk to disk. Your primary will be disk 1 and the "to" disk will be disk 2. Once it is done, pull out disk2 from the machine, or just disconnect it. And now you have a fully cloned drive and YES it is bootable.

by tomsal

I do the same as mentioned by LordInfidel. Not only that I've done it with Win98, WinXP, Win2000 and WinME drives. No problem with any of them. I've never tried Ghosting NT4 yet though...I'm assuming it would be fine.

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