Radified Community Forums - Cloning partitions with Ghost 9

rick stone

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #45 - Nov 28^th, 2005 at 4:21pm

What's wrong with the following back-up routine?

Two hard drives each with just one partition.
Windows XP Home
Ghost 10.0
Second Hard Drive just used for back-ups--nothing else.
Every week, "copy my Hard Drive" to the second drive.
No image is created--just a complete clone
Don't disconnect either drive
That way, if the C drive fails, you just remove it and put the D drive into the c drive bay and hook it up.

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	Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9 Reply #46 - Nov 28^th, 2005 at 6:20pm rick stone Quote: What's wrong with the following back-up routine? I don't know--does it work?! Have you put the second HDD in place of the 1st one--boot okay?
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rick stone

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #47 - Nov 28^th, 2005 at 6:48pm

I haven't tried it yet. I'm just hoping that the system will boot O.K. if I leave the C drive AND the second hard drive (D) hooked up. I'd like to do the disk copy weekly without disconnecting the D drive. Since it's a duplicate, will Windows get confused with 2 identical drives?
Since it's a clone, I assume it'll boot up if I disconnect the C drive and hook up the D drive as my C drive.

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #48 - Nov 29^th, 2005 at 12:44am

rick stone

Quote:

Since it's a duplicate, will Windows get confused with 2 identical drives?

That's why I asked if it was working--the answer is--sometimes WinXP has a problem with *seeing itself in a mirror*!

The boot HDD copy of WinXP will have to deal with the fact that it sees a second HDD that is supposed to be assigned the drive letter C:\, too, based on the fact that it is a *clone* of the boot HDD. I've seen some posts that say they get away with it--and others end up with a system that will not boot at all!

It's been unclear what makes the difference--but, I'd say it's risky--and I would want to do the experiment knowing I have already made a reliable, and restorable Ghost image to another HDD--or be using a spare HDD that I've cloned for the purpose of experimenting, and keeping the original disconnected during the trial.

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rick stone

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	Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9 Reply #49 - Nov 29^th, 2005 at 10:44am Thanks Night Owl. All I want is to be able to replace a damaged C drive with my D drive that I've cloned once a week. Ghost can copy the entire C drive without making an image, but nowhere in the manual does it say that the second drive then has to be removed (or disconnected).
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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #50 - Nov 29^th, 2005 at 11:16am

rick stone

I'm looking at the Ghost 9.x user guide (I should download the Ghost 10.x guide Wink

, but haven't yet!):

Quote:

Set drive active (for
starting OS)

Make the destination drive the active partition (the drive the
computer starts from). Only one drive can be active at a
time. To start the computer, it must be on the first drive, and
it must contain an operating system. When the computer
starts, it reads the partition table of the first drive to find
out which drive is active and starts from that location. If the
drive is not bootable or you are not certain that it is, have
a boot disk ready. Set drive active is valid for
basic disks only (not dynamic disks).

Looks like Ghost 9.x will not *automatically* make a cloned HDD's primary partition *active* unless you specify that. So maybe your scenario would work--but, you have to have the needed boot disk that allows you to set the HDD active if you need to replace the original boot drive. You would also have to place the backup HDD in the same position as the original HDD on the HDD controller.

If you want to do thing that way--may be worth the effort to test it out.

But, best to have a *cloned* backup drive to do the testing with before going *live* with your active HDD.

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Derek Cornish

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #51 - Dec 10^th, 2005 at 12:02am

The issue of how to continuously "re-clone" a second HDD with Norton Ghost (v9, in my case) is not often discussed, so I was glad to come upon this thread.

In my case I am cloning (disk copying) from my main HDD to a second larger one in an extra bay in my Thinkpad Notebook (an A31). So no issues with jumpers and all that sort of thing.

The Ghost manual is really vestigial, though, and doesn't explain in enough detail for my liking. Brian's explanation was much more helpful). Here is a list of the sorts of things one has to watch out for - beyond the obvious like making sure you clone the right drive :-):

1. Don't allocate drive letters to the destination drive

2. Only tick the MBR box for the destination's active primary partition (the mirror of your source's C: drive)

3. If you have a hidden active recovery partition of some sort on your source drive (Thinkpad's usually do), make sure NOT to tick "active" when you copy it to the destination drive (I did and had to use PartitionMagic from DOS later to de-activate it).

4. Finally, the question of when or whether to activate the primary partition of the destination drive.... In the User Guide, it clearly says to tick the box, “set drive active (for booting OS)”. Now that is all very well for two scenarios: first, when you want to check out whether the cloning has actually worked; and/or second, when you actually want to replace your original source drive by the newly cloned destination one.

BUT many people don't actually want to do this until their source drive either gets filled up or breaks down. In the meantime what they want to do is continuously re-clone their destination drive - say, once a week or so in order to keep an updated "spare" on their system.

I am not quite sure what the best thing to do in this case is. Maybe NOT setting the destination drive active the next time one clones to it might be the best thing to do to avoid confusing XP SP2 (my brand of Windows). Of course, one would need to be able set the destination drive "active" in the event of the source disk filling up or breaking down. This could be done by using a PartitionMagic boot floppy to boot up the notebook and then changing the status of the destination HDD's C: drive to "active".

The reason I am rambling on about this is that I re-cloned my destination HDD for the first time today. When I did so, I - possibly mistakenly - set the destination drive active (for booting OS), as it mentions in the Manual.

Everything seemed to go fine but, later in the afternoon when I had to re-boot for an unconnected reason, I found myself booted into the destination disk, not the source one. After a lot of not very expert fiddling I managed to boot back into the original source drive, but it gave me a nasty fright.

Has anyone esle had this problem, and does NOT setting the destination drive active solve it?

Derek

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Brian

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #52 - Dec 10^th, 2005 at 12:34am

Derek, I've only done Copy Drive once as I'm not planning to change HD's. Even with new HD's you can get them up and running by restoring images. Copy Drive is not a sensible backup technique.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general;action=display;num=11329...

See Reply #7

Let us know if you see advantages in the Copy Drive technique of backup. I see lots of disadvantages.

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Derek Cornish

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #53 - Dec 12^th, 2005 at 4:05am

Brian-

Sorry; I wasn't being very clear. I have been using the re-cloning technique I mentioned as an additional backup technique rather than as a replacement. I do it about once a week or so.

But I also make image files, which I do more frequently using a PCMCIA FlipDisk (removable HDD). I am just about to invest in a larger external HDD (USB or PCMCIA) so that I can do more frequent imaging, and keep sets of these files.

Apart from this I also copy important folders in my data partition to a CD-RW on a daily basis, using my file manager (TotalCommander), and use Caddais BackupOnDemand - a backup program that backs up open files (e.g., Word docs) in real time while you are using them.

So I am a belt-and-braces user. Having said that, I do like the idea of being able, additionally, to swap out a faulty hard disk and swap in a new one ASAP, rather than to depend entirely on the integrity of any image file I have.

As you say, though, there do appear to be problems with the constant re-cloning backup technique. But am hopeful - or foolishly optimistic ? :-) - that a reliable way of doing it will be found.

Maybe one problem with my current method is that I am using Ghost v.9 and doing the cloning from within XP. Various people have suggested that XP easily gets muddled when two identical cloned and active drives exist on the same machine. Others have reported problems following upgrading to XP SP2.

Nothing much to be done about the SP2 issue, but could it be that this method would be safer if Ghost 2003 were used, and the cloning done from DOS?

Just a few more thoughts on this interesting topic.

Derek

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Brian

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #54 - Dec 12^th, 2005 at 4:35am

You really are a belt and braces man, Derek. I understand now.

I don't think there is a problem with your technique if you are following my original suggestions in post #1. Which would mean deleting the partition every week and copying into unallocated space etc. But you wouldn't tick "set drive active". The partition would be hidden when you rebooted. You certainly don't want two visible WinXP's.

You should however make sure that it works. At least once. Remove your primary HD, set the secondary HD as master, use a PM floppy to set the partition active and see if it boots. If it doesn't you may have been wasting your time with this technique.

Belt and braces and pants sutured to the skin.

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Paul Kupfer

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #55 - Dec 13^th, 2005 at 12:55pm

I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to "clone" a drive that has been sealed using sysprep. What I want to do is to make a disk image that I can then install onto different machines to save myself the time of doing Windows XP installations. I want to create an answer file with sysprep so that it will re-detect hardware on a new machine, and then mini-install an updated version of Windows with all of the necessary software already installed. So far the only solution I can think of is this:

1. Prepare a Windows installation. on drive A
2. Run sysprep to seal the installation on drive A.
3. Remove drive A, and put it into a machine running windows with ghost installed.
4. "clone" or copy drive A to drive B making it bootable and keeping the mbr intact.
5. Put drive A into a new machine, and hope that it goes.

Does anyone see problems with this? Has anyone done anything similar? My concern is that if I make a disk copy with ghost it will not work on a machine with different hardware, unless I run sysprep. I have tried g4u, with no success (always get some sort of corrupt file, or drive just won't boot). I have not yet experimented with simple dd of an unmounted system partition, but this may work also?? Any input would be greatly appreciated.

--Paul

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Derek Cornish

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #56 - Dec 13^th, 2005 at 1:58pm

Brian -

Thanks for your advice. You've confirmed my suspicions that setting the destination disk "active" may be at the root of problems when regularly re-cloning to the 2nd HDD in situ. Next time I do a backup to that drive I'll test things out as you suggested.

Incidentally, even though at present the primary partitions on both my source and destination drives are set "active", XP only sees the source one - luckily. Somehow the destination one remains invisible, though Ghost v9 sees it if I prepare to clone to it. A further interesting fact is that PartitionMagic v8 sees the destination drive as "bad" when I run it in XP, but sees it and all its partitions perfectly well when I run PM from its DOS boot floppy. All of this suggests, as you rightly comment, that XP is easily confused by these goings on.

To summarize: As a rule of thumb, setting the destination drive as "active" should only be done if the cloned second drive is going to be removed from the computer and used - immediately or in the very near future - to replace the source drive. In this case, it must be removed from the computer once the cloning process is over and set aside until needed, using the procedure you outlined i.e., shutting down the computer immediately, and removing the destination (2nd) HDD before any rebooting.

To test whether the cloning has worked, one would use the same procedure (shutdown, removal of 2nd HDD) but, in addition, the source drive would also be removed and set aside, and the destination drive (the cloned one) would be installed in the main drive's bay and booted up to check it out. If it worked ok, then it could either be left in there as a replacement for the original drive, or taken out and set aside for installation at a later date.

In all other cases - and especially where regular re-cloning is going to take place - the destination drive should NOT be set "active." Testing whether the cloning process worked should be done as above and, perhaps, from time to time thereafter - although notebook users should note that main drive connector sockets are not designed for constant plugging and unplugging of HDDs.

Sorry to be so repetitive, but I wanted to get this straight in my mind :-)

Derek

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Brian

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	Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9 Reply #57 - Dec 13^th, 2005 at 3:16pm Sounds fine Derek. Let us know when you have done a test. I agree, those socket pins look very fragile.
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Andrew James Chang

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Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9
Reply #58 - Dec 24^th, 2005 at 6:24am

Hey, so I'm sort of a n00b here... but reading the posts it doesn't seem like anyone has experienced the dilemma im currently facing. Or maybe I've just been to depraved of a noise free environment to catch the posts.

Anyways, I've got norton ghost 10.0 and I want to clone my 40GB Maxtor HD, with my os and stuff, to my 200GB Seagate HD. My good ol' 40GB Maxtor is just to loud and I cant stand it. The thing is, I've already formatted my 200GB HD and it has a lot of valuable data on it. Sooooooooo, if I clone my HD, will it just overwrite all my data, or can I configure it to create a new partition within the 200GB HD.

What I want to do is remove my 40GB hd after all this is done, so i can have some peace and quiet. Is this even possible tho, cuz it seems that everyone here wants to clone their old HD's onto NEW hard drives, that have not already been formatted. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Sleepless in Vancouver

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Brian

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	Re: Cloning partitions with Ghost 9 Reply #59 - Dec 24^th, 2005 at 8:55am Andrew, A few basic questions. How many partitions and how much data is on your 40 GB HD? How many partitions and how much data is on your 200 GB HD? Do you have an external HD? Do you have partitioning software?
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