Making an exact copy of 1 Harddrive to another.

[KK]

I tried posting in GH for a fix on how to make a mirror of the main hard drive, but come to the conclusion it cannot be done. I got 3 30GB striped as one drive and a new 100GB drive. How do I make a copy of the striped set on the new drive. I want to be able to boot from this hard drive if one of the 3 striped ones fail. the striped set is my c drive and it shows that it is a dynamic disk in WinXP. What program will allow this to be done.

Someone help, please.
KK

 

[NzAnE2K]

I went and found Drive2Drive 2.0. It might work. Try it out.

 

[KK]

yeah, I looked at that already, looks promising, but it doesn't support 2000 or XP yet. They say its coming soon. any other programs out there?

Thanks
KK

 

[Entity]

Look around at Ghost - it may or may not do it, but is worth a check.

We use it at work for Drive-Drive copying and love it.

Rob

 

[Bglad]

Ghost will do a stripe to disk copy. Same command as disk to disk. But it will not burn an image to NTFS if you want to use it for that later. You will have to keep the 100G drive FAT32.

DriveImage 5 will work fully with NTFS.

 

[KK]

Just got DriveImage and it doesn't deal with Dynamic Disks. I shouldn't of have changed from basic to Dynamic early this morning. Oh well, what's done is done. Any other program out there that may do this. And what exactly is a dynamic disk??

KK

 

[Bglad]

Read this page: MS dynamic disk
and here

I did a little reading for ya. Looks like you really really didn't want that dynamic disk and now you are in a pickle. I think dynamic drive allows it to be read by any OS over a network and is necessary for software RAID. DOS can't read from the dynamic disk and both DriveImage and Ghost must work under DOS. Partition Magic won't fix it.

You may want to reload XP on the new 100G drive. Then x-fer all your stuff from the stripe to the 100G. Then you can clear and reset your stripe, use DriveImage to x-fer the 100G to the stripe and use it from there keeping the 100G as your backup. Admittedly this is not a good suggestion but it may be your only option.

Hmmm, if it can be accessed over a network, maybe you could back it up to another computer over a network. Do you have another machine networked that you could image it to? Actually, this probably won't work. You can't image it if it is booted to Windows and if you boot to DOS with network support DOS won't see the drive. Argh.

Hopefully someone who knows more about dynamic disks will see this and offer a better solution. There has got to be a way to backup but it may be an enterprise solution that costs a lot of $$.

[edit]
Upon further searching I found this from Saltin:
For the record, if you converted the disc to dynamic under 2k, there is NO way to revert back short of formatting. Your data is gone if you revert, no two ways about it.

 

[KK]

Thanks Bglad, Yeah, looking back on it I could kick myself for making it a dynamic disk. Looks like I'll have to do what you said, make a copy of everything on the cdrive and format the cdrive, and start over with a new copy of winXP on a basic disk. Also, when I did convert this stripe set to dynamic, now ever time I reboot the array drops the last disk in it, causing me to delete the array and redefine it. Scared the hell out of me the first time. I thought I was totally screwed and would have to format and start over, but luckily it started back without having to do that. To say the least, the wife woulda chopped off my nuts. I did copy all my files last night to the new hard drive, I just hope once i put winxp back on the stripe, that I can read the new harddrive. Should be able to.

KK