Is there something easier to use for newbies other than Norton Ghost for cloning drives?

[Salvador]

Hi,

I sold a hard drive to a friend of mine and she's a computer novice at best. She wants to clone the image of her present drive over to the new drive. I suggested Norton Ghost, but it seems a bit complicated for newbies to handle.

Is there some sort of software that will easily clone the image of an old drive to a new drive? Sometime more simple than Norton Ghost?

TIA,

Sal

 

[Nothinman]

Ghost is fully scriptable, write a script for her.

 

[Salvador]

She may be a complete novice, but I'm not that advanced. What do you mean by write a script for her?

Sal

 

[Joemonkey]

Ghost is actually pretty easy

Just make the boot floppy, and when Ghost boots up, choose Local -> Disk -> To Disk

Then you pick the original disk and destination disk... should be easy to tell apart by size and/or position on the IDE cable

 

[Salvador]

Yeah.. I just ran through it to check it out. I have never used it yet and didn't want it to be too complicated. What threw me is an article in PC World or PC Magazine that I skimmed over recently that praised the software for functionality, but gave it poor marks for not being very user friendly. I don't see it being too complicated myself.

BTW... Doesn't the software the comes with hard drives have something for cloning drives? I didn't even check to see if WD's Lifegaurd software or Maxtor's Maxblast has something to clone the image over. If it does, I wonder if it's even easier than Ghost?

Anyway.. Thanks again. I'd still like to know what Nothinman meant by writing a script in Ghost. Do you have to know how to write software or is it a feature in Ghost?

Sal

 

[Joemonkey]

I'm pretty sure maxblast has some sort of cloning thingy... but I would go with ghost. I used to be a driveimage fan until i started working where i do now, and ghost is a little easier, but a bit less intuitive. Once you've messed with ghost a bit, it becomes second nature.

 

[Salvador]

Thanks.. I'll stick with Ghost. It seems very straight forward.

Sal

 

[Dan]

A good alternative to Ghost is PowerQuest's DriveImage.

 

[kursplat]

voteing for drive image 5.0- just doesn't get any easyer
good luck

 

[JellyBaby]

What threw me is an article in PC World or PC Magazine that I skimmed over recently that praised the software for functionality, but gave it poor marks for not being very user friendly.

Sigh. Just because a program doesn't have bright colors, pretty background bitmaps and animated help dogs doesn't mean it's hard to use.

Ghost is a simple program that does some very technical tasks. It could use better help but it's pretty straightforward.

 

[corkyg]

The easiest way for novices to clone a drive or a partition of a drive is with DriveCopy 4.0. You create two floppies - bootable and have a simple menu to follow. It doesn't image or need restoring - just a precise drive-to-drive copy. Can be FAT, FAT32, NTFS or whatever - even mixed. I have DriveImage and Ghost, but rarely use either because direct copy is faster and easier.

 

[Bglad]

Don't forget that Ghost is not fully compatible with NTFS.

Drive Image is.

 

[Nothinman]

Ghost works fine with NTFS, we use it at work with hundreds of NT 4 NTFS machines and I've used it on Win2K and XP boxes using NTFS.

You do need Ghost 7 to fully support XP's NTFS, but that's MS' fault for changing sh!t around not Symantec's.

 

[RalfHutter]

No, Ghost is not fully compatible with NTFS. You can not copy an image from an NTFS partition to an NTFS partition using Ghost. You have to copy it toa FAT32 partition, or a CDr, or a network drive.

Drive Image does not have this limitation.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: JellyBaby

What threw me is an article in PC World or PC Magazine that I skimmed over recently that praised the software for functionality, but gave it poor marks for not being very user friendly.

Sigh. Just because a program doesn't have bright colors, pretty background bitmaps and animated help dogs doesn't mean it's hard to use.

Ghost is a simple program that does some very technical tasks. It could use better help but it's pretty straightforward.

Dhost acts like a DOS based program. No fancy user I/f

The PC World/Mags are way to biased toward M$ style flashy interfaces. Whether a program does the job intended or not is no longer the main criterea. They look at how the program presents itself to the user using a GUI.

The first Word Perfect and Lotus 123 wuld fail miserably for them if it was reviewed today even though that is what started the PC S/W revolution.

 

[Jaylio]

I have drive image 5.0 and I cant find how to make a drive to drive copy? I see how to go from drive -cdrw-drive, but I have too much info for that to be usefull. Am I just overlooking something?

 

[corkyg]

"I have drive image 5.0 and I cant find how to make a drive to drive copy?"

Open your DI 5.0 manual to page 45. It is covered in detail with illustrations. It is also in PDF format on the CD under English\Docs\CopyDrives.PDF.

 

[Jaylio]

I have just tried cloning a drive this morniing. I couldnt get maxblast to work, it said it didnt support ntfs. So I went to maxtors web site, they have a new one that does. I just got done with it, this is my first time ever trying and it couldnt have been any easier. I downloaded their program, which walked me through making a boot disk.Restarted and it held my hand all the way through. Could not have been any easier.

 

[randypj]

corky-g--

Is Drive Copy faster at cloning a full drive to drive, than DI is? If so, any idea why?
--Randy

 

[corkyg]

Hi, Randy. Yes - I do believe it (DC) is a bit faster than DI. It does a direct "Smart" copy - technically in clones the drive directly and the data flow rate is about 320 MBPS on average. I have both programs, and just shoved DI 5 to the closet as "shelfware." It also has to really do its work in a DOS environment for the Copy function. So, both require boot disks (I have it on a bootable CDR). DI can do a lot more stuff - but in the Copy mode, DI is really DC. Same menus and screens from the Command Prompt. Same choices.

DI costs more than DC, and unless you are going to do CDR/RW backups of specific data, DC is more cost effective. It does everything I need. Drive 1 or 2 to Drive 1 or 2. They don't even have to be the same size. I keep an emergency 30 GB HDD in the closet - clone of my regular 40 GB HDD. I have a pair of 40s in each computer, and by using Mobile Racks and their key switches, I run one at a time and do a complete clone job every weekend.

It is more than just a backup - it is a "ready reserve" drive.

 

[wyvrn]

I use ghost and first time I used it had no problems.

I also used to use a program called xxcopy (website with same name). XXcopy is a modified version of MS's Xcopy.exe that has several useful switches, including a /clone switch. Can't get any easier than that, can it?

 

[corkyg]

Yes, it can. Switches for newbies can be an obstacle. But, there is another consideration. I used to do this with XCOPY32 a few years back - and it was a slow process in DOS. The main problem is that the files are copied in file order (date usually). So you end up with a totally unoptimized product.

With DC or DI, you first optimize the source drive. When you make the copy, the result is exactly the same - optimized. That does not happen with XCopy. I don't know about ghost, but an image file should be an exact clone - and if the source is optimized, so would be the target.

 

[Mavrick007]

corky, so you are saying that Direct Copy will make a clone like an OS partition from one drive and it will operate as if it was the same boot OS on another drive?