Ok, here is the deal, and I think this would be good to know for all of those looking into learning Linux as well.
Currently at work I have a system (desktop) with 2 IDE based drives, master (OS — WinXP) and slave (for data recovery, images for testing, etc.). I had an internal drive bay for the second, but I need the storage now.
Anyway, I have started using USB drive bays to recover data. But I just ran into a problem.
On Thursday, I had an ER recovery, and my manager requested the disk to be cloned. No Problem I say because I have done it many times. Usually it will take a few hours. But this time, it is cloning from a USB 2 drive. After an hour (Using Ghost 2003) I noticed that the speed was running at 17MB/Min. That translates to 1020MB/Hr. There is 36 GB on this drive.
Friday morning it was still running, and the user is asking why her system is not ready.
Then, another user comes in with a system that BSOD’s on boot. It is easily tracked to the SW reg hive being corrupt. I could not use my machine for another 14 hours so, I setup a new desktop system with XP, 2 Hdd’s and Ghost. Borrowed a USB drive bay, and started it. It ran at 112MB/Min.. Great, I thought about taking the first drive and using it on the new system. But after 5 min, it was running at 17MB/min.
Ok, this is too slow, in Windows, it works fast like it should, from the Ghost boot it runs like molasses.
Is there a solution in Linux that can clone a drive to an image file to be extracted on another drive where both the source and destination are a USB drive bay.
And, will it keep Linux open where the USB will work better, or will it close out to the command line or perform like ghost? Later Friday, I had another users drive go out and I had to tell them I could not get to it until Monday.
I was reading a bit on DD, but it looks like it just clones the drive to another, but I did not see anything that said it worked on USB drives, or that it creates a file to be extracted.
Any help would be appreciated, and I do mark as helpful. I just want to get the clone time down to a reasonable time frame. Cause 36+ hours for 36GB is just way too much.