Best way to back up hard drive in this situation?

[Electrode]

Here's the situation:

I have a laptop with a 3.2 GB hard drive, all in 1 partition. The OS installed is Windows 2000 Professional. I've done quite a bit of work stripping it down to the bare essentials, so I want to back it up for easy reinstallation.

* I don't think that the Backup utility included with Windows would be able to restore everything correctly
* I'm using the NTFS filesystem, so the hard drive can't be read from DOS or written from Linux
* My laptop network card doesn't work in Linux, so I can't mount an NFS share and dd the drive to it
* I don't have a copy of Norton Ghost that would work in Win2K, and even if I did, I wouldn't want to install it, since I doubt I'd be able to completely remove it when the backup is done
* The hard drive uses some screwy proprietary interface, so I can't just plug it into one of my desktop rigs
* No CD burner

So, what can I do?

 

[Sephiroth]

Does it have USB connections? How much stuff do you want to back up? Do you have any external devices like an external CD burner, or one of those new key fobs? That would work as well.

 

[Electrode]

Originally posted by: Sephiroth
Does it have USB connections?

No built-in connections, but I've got a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card.

How much stuff do you want to back up?

The entire contents of the hard drive, about 900 MB.

Do you have any external devices like an external CD burner, or one of those new key fobs?

Key fobs? Never heard of them. The only thing I have is a USB IDE adapter.

 

[Bglad]

I've dealt with the same thing for awhile and found no good solutions. How the h*** do you people running laptops back them up? You just flying on a wing and a prayer? Not me!! Anyway, I'm running Win 2k on my laptop also. Ghost won't work because it has trouble restoring NTFS because it works in dos.

The problem with sepiroth's suggestions is complete disk imaging needs to be done in dos or dos equivalent and those peripherals are VERY hard to get working outside of Windows.

Suggestion 1:
You need to buy DriveImage. Load it on some other computer if you are worried about your clean install, and use that to make floppy boot discs (unlike Ghost it will make discs that work fine with ntfs). Then remove the lappy hard drive and temporarily connect it to a desktop machine with one of those little $2 portable drive converters. Backup to the desktop machine then reinstall the drive to your laptop.

Suggestion 2:
Partition your lappy hd (you may have to buy a bigger drive for this one but I can tell you a 20G 5400rpm drive is $100 at Newegg and well worth the investment) and backup your main partition to the 2nd partition. Then boot into Windows and do whatever you need to with the backup whether it be burn to cd's or x-fer to another machine over the network.

By the way, I tried for months and asked many on here to help me get my cardbus network card to work in dos so I could backup over the network to another machine in which I keep a large removeable backup drive. Supposedly it can be done but I never could get it to work and finally just gave up.

 

[redbeard1]

The hard drive uses some screwy proprietary interface

More than likely, the proprietary interface is an adapter mounted on an ordinary drive. I just had a laptop drive fool me on the first glance, but when I pulled it out of the system, I could remove the adapter to get at the normal plug in.

I don't have a copy of Norton Ghost that would work in Win2K, and even if I did, I wouldn't want to install it, since I doubt I'd be able to completely remove it when the backup is done

After ghost is installed, I usually just copy ghost.exe to a bootable floppy and run it from there.

Ghost won't work because it has trouble restoring NTFS because it works in dos.

HUH? I use a 98 bootable disk, with ghost on the floppy, and ghost 2000 and xp all the time.

 

[Electrode]

Originally posted by: redbeard1

The hard drive uses some screwy proprietary interface

More than likely, the proprietary interface is an adapter mounted on an ordinary drive. I just had a laptop drive fool me on the first glance, but when I pulled it out of the system, I could remove the adapter to get at the normal plug in.

I'm not sure if that is the case or not. The connecter, be it an adapter or not, is held on by 2 screws that can't be accessed from the outside of the drive. There is a cover on the top of the drive assembely that is held on by a hinge on the back and 2 phillips screws on the front. It might just be an outer cover, but I don't have the money to buy a replacement drive if that turns out not to be the case.

If anyone has experience with ca. 1997 Compaq hardware, maybe they could tell me what exactly this thing is. If it does turn out to be a standard laptop drive in an adapter, that would make things much easier.

 

[Bglad]

It is a removeable cover that a. takes up space so the drive doesn't rattle around and b. uses a flat cable with traces to make a 90 degree turn to the connector that plugs into the motherboard. The only thing proprietary is that housing and connector. Pull the screws, take the housing off, unplug the drive and put a bigger one in.

 

[Electrode]

I see. Thanks!

Now I just have to pick up a laptop-to-desktop adapter and the problem of backing up the drive becomes trivial.

 

[Bglad]

HUH? I use a 98 bootable disk, with ghost on the floppy, and ghost 2000 and xp all the time.

Have you tried to restore or only backed up? It will back up fine but it will not restore NTFS... it can't. Dos cannot write to NTFS and Ghost runs in dos. It can backup however because when it backs up it simply copies the drive sector by sector without actually reading it and then writes the backup to fat 32.

Run a search there has been sooooo much discussion about this in these forums.

 

[redbeard1]

I was not aware of that issue, since I'm usually doing straight copies. Though I did a google search and came up with this link that says ghost 2003 can do it. His description starts with this paragraph: 'Update 04feb2003'

Article

 

[JCK86]

Ghost 2003 can handle NTFS, and it boots from a floppy. If you don't want to install it on your 2k machine, just make the floppy from a 9x computer.

Your can dump a diskimage over the network if it likes your NIC.

 

[Joker81]

Originally posted by: JCK86
Ghost 2003 can handle NTFS, and it boots from a floppy. If you don't want to install it on your 2k machine, just make the floppy from a 9x computer.

Your can dump a diskimage over the network if it likes your NIC.

Even older versions can I think 2001. But You may have a problem trying to find the right NIC. I was able to do this although it took 72hours to copy all the files over the network. But the strange thing it only took 6 hours to copy back don't know why tho, If you use ghost you probably don't want to compress the data of it just because thats a lot of extra work for the laptop to do and may increase your transfer alot. I think you could even download the Evaluation Version of Norton Ghost Enterprise to Check it out. maybe.

 

[JCK86]

I have found the NIC to be the bottleneck in network clones. I can copy a 600 MB image in 15 minutes with the highest compression turned on- and that's on a PII 233.