Need some Tech help

[osoab]

I need to backup a hard drive @ work. Basically make a mirror of the hard drive complete with the OS and the few programs. We had some sectors go bad on a drive that runs a machine. I was lucky enough that I was able to pull a hard drive and get chkdsk to fix it on another machine.
So the machine is running, but we want to have a backup hard drive ready to plug and play.

I am using the same hard drive with the exception of 40 gigs extra of space.
Seagate Momentus.


I have downloaded the copy program from the hard drive maker to do this.

I was wondering if I have to partition the drive prior to making the mirror, or if the drive makers program will take care of it.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

[Horn]

It was my understanding that to do a mirror the drive would need to be exact size of the original.

& on the newer SATA motherboards could be handled with a RAID utility program from the manuf.

I always think of doing it to my machine,

but end up spending most maintenance time reinstalling an older version of windows, becuz the existing was corrupted in someway.

[Hatha Sunahara]

Try something like Norton Ghost. This makes an identical copy of your HDD--including the operating system and everything on the disk.

Also, there are lots of Backup and Restore programs that do the same thing. If you have a lot of stuff on your HDD, you'll need another HDD the same size or bigger to store the backup.


Hatha

[Canadian-guerilla]

a little off topic

would it be possible to put an ( operational ) OS on a 8 gig thumb drive ?

[JohnQPublic]

a little off topic

would it be possible to put an ( operational ) OS on a 8 gig thumb drive ?

I think this is very easy with Linux- see for instant Knoppix boot disk. The issue is if the machine is set to boot from USB. When you start-up hit F12 (I believe) and set the boot drive to USB.

I suspect you can do this with windows, too, but have not tried.

[Carl]

a little off topic

would it be possible to put an ( operational ) OS on a 8 gig thumb drive ? There's a generic windows xp that is made to run off a thumb drive, it's configured to run with almost any hardware.

You can install a retail xp on an 8gb thumb, but hardware compatibility becomes an issue between machines, too many differences and it won't run at all or it will demand a relicensing to keep using.

[Carl]

Professionally, I use Acronis True Image to copy drives, it is easy to understand, menu driven, simple and quick. The new drive can be as large as you like.

[osoab]

Thanks for the responses.

I plan on using Seagate's Disk Wizard. http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/savvio-15k/discwizard-master-dl/
Figured go with the manufacturer.

I am trying to do this on the lowest cost as possible.

The OS (XP) of the computer I am cloning is the largest part. We just want a backup of the hard drive for when the current on fails. Our machine settings will still be available and the machine will not be down for a week+ until manufacturer support arrives.

Still don't know what set the machine off. It never would boot xp. Just kept going through a loop of trying to start up. Do you think it is just the drive failing? I don't think it was lightning if none of the other machines and components of the machine in question had no issues.

[Carl]

OK, try tapping the F8 key when you first turn the computer on, it should give you a boot menu, scroll up to "boot in safe mode" select it, hit enter and see if it will go there.

If it boots into safe mode, run a virus scan and a registry cleaner, when done, reboot to normal mode, it should work.

Oh, if the OS won't boot on the old drive, it's not gonna boot on the new drive.

[TheNocturnalEgyptian]

I recently started using Ghost to multi-cast. That is, you take a .img backup of your entire HDD, and you can broadcast it to multipe HDD. It's really useful. Exact copy of the HDD.

The program does all the work of taking the exact backup. Imaging is really useful.

[osoab]

OK, try tapping the F8 key when you first turn the computer on, it should give you a boot menu, scroll up to "boot in safe mode" select it, hit enter and see if it will go there.

If it boots into safe mode, run a virus scan and a registry cleaner, when done, reboot to normal mode, it should work.

Oh, if the OS won't boot on the old drive, it's not gonna boot on the new drive.

I got the thing running.

After talking to two different tech guys from the manufacturer, the second one being the brightest, I was able to locate the drive on the machine.
I popped it out and learned that they used a 40gb laptop hard drive to run the thing. So I got an IDE usb hard drive insert so I could run chkdsk on another computer.

The biggest pain is that this computer doesn't have a cd-rom on it. I was told that there is a specific plug to attach another computer to it, but we don't have it.

Any way, after running chkdsk and letting that fix the errors, the damn thing booted. No issues for a few days. I don't trust this thing not to crash so this is my reasoning for creating the clone. The boss doesn't need a machine down for a week or more waiting for a tech to come fix it.