Hard disk imaging / data backup?

Second: If you use a plug and play operating system like XP the new larger drive will not make any difference. See number one below for the caveats.

First: you will not be able to get a 20GB image on to the CD-R. Unless you will be creating the image with a product like Ghost you will find this difficult. Ghost will take the hard disk and create an image that will "split" at 2GB. This is a hard limit. You can "split" the image at a size that will fit onto a CD. Burning directly to a CD is something Ghost will do with only a little extra effort. You should review their literature for the best process in your circumstances.

Imaging to CD (with a product like ghost) is fine, if it is just the static info you want to backup, such as applications/registry settings etc.

But computers are rarely static, and to have to keep ghosting is not an efficient way to work.

Perhaps instead you could get a second HDD for your machine, and have the machine run mirroring (where the disk is dynamically being copied to the second disk) so the second disk can take over if the first fails. Mirroring can be SW (operating system) driven in NT, 2K - I don't know about XP.

Alternatively, get a tape backup - this is by far the most flexible option.

1. If you want to replace the hard drive ...you could do a disk copy using the Symantec(Ghost), Power Quest, or even the Hard drive utilites that comes with when you purchase one. This is done on EIDE drives not on scsi drives. Please take note thatyou do the disk copy on a DOS mode or PC DOS that is why I did mention that the drives are EIDE because in SCSI you wil need the driver for the SCSI controller before the drives could be recognized.

2. The mirroring is not posible in NT nor XP workstations even you have scsi drives (which I doubt). Mirroring feature is just for servers.

3.Well if you plan to make a back up using CD-R please bear in mind that you will be using so many disk..( 1 CD-r holds only 700mb) so better buy the hard drive you need before your drive will get corrupted. Although you have a free space right now, it might not be enough.

Even if one were to use a image program such as (symantec) Ghost, the maximum data that can be spanned is 2 GB. This is due to the FAT (16) file system used by CD to store data. Therefore, you can not make a continous image of 20 GB. Okay, now to a possible solution. I would suggest obtaining either a MB with ATA RAID built in, or buying a promise RAID card to plug into your current MB. From there you could configure the RAID BIOS (firmware) to raid 1 (mirroring) with two like drives. You then have complete redundancy with the only drawback being slower operation due to the doubling of data being written. Hope this helps.

put both drives in the system, install Ghost 2002 on there, and image straight from the 20 to the 40 in one swipe... It's possible without CDs...