Hello all!

I'm hoping to tap a bit of the collective genius so freely flowing around here!

I have an IDE drive installed and I'd like to replace it with 2 (mirrored) scsi drives.  I'll do the mirroring through windows once I'm booting from the first SCSI drive, so for now, we'll forget about the second scsi drive.   

These drives also require I install a SCSI card.  (adaptec 19160)

My intentions are to image the current IDE drive, saving the ghost image to an external USB HDD.  Then (physically) install the new SCSI card and drives and restore the ghost image to the new SCSI drive.

Afterwards I'll just boot to the SCSI drive and remove the IDE drive completely.  (or keep it around to hold ghost images or something)

My question is this:  When should I "install" the new hardware, BEFORE I image the IDE drive (so that the OS has a chance to see the new card and drive before it's actually running from it) or AFTER (since the OS will be running FROM this drive and may get confused since it previously saw it as a secondary drive, not the primary?

To me, that question seems to be important, but maybe it doesn't really matter -- Is there anything else I'm missing that I SHOULD be asking before attempting this? 

Thanks for any insight!

~shawn

Ugh ... I started my reply and then clicked on a link in an email, which opened in THIS window.  Clicking "back", of course doesn't remember what I typed ... I hate it when that happens ... anyway, here goes again!

First, I'm a Ghost-Virgin.  I've never imaged (or cloned, which I gather is somehow different?) a drive before in my life, although I'm somewhat technically adept.

The machine in question is a "mission-critical" PC running win2k Server.  I don't need server, but there was a time when I was considering running more than one web domain from it and win2k Pro will only handle one.  I'm no longer using it as a webserver at all though, just a Goldmine server (a CRM application) with about 4 users that perform light-duty database transactions.  Roaming users "sync" with this server nightly via the internet.

I currently backup daily to an external HDD all mission critical files.  NOT the entire OS.  So in the event of disaster, I'll have to replace the machine, Load the OS and necessary applications, then restore the data from backups. 

My initial thought was to use these two SCSI drives I have from an unused workstation and mirror them to gain redundancy.  When disaster strikes one HDD, the other is immediately available to boot to.  No OS reloading, No applicaiton reloading, etc. 

Reliability is paramount to performance in my situation, so I think this should work pretty well.

I'm starting to think, however ... that if Ghost is as foolproof as the Rad-Religion says it is, maybe I should re-think my approach. 

Maybe I should keep a good ghost image around, which provides me with a "base" starting point.  Disaster->Fix/Replace->Ghost restore-> restore incremental data from backup. 

Since there is relatively little data that changes on the machine, this may be the way to go.  Utilize ghost for the OS and applications, and the backup system for changed data since the Ghost image was captured.

If this route is employed, I could then go with RAID 0 and stripe both disks for definite increased performance over existing single IDE drive.

Comments/recommendations on this approach?

For completeness, I'll answer the other questions:

I have Ghost 2003, from the Norton Systemworks 2003 Professional cd. 

Having not imaged anything before I don't know the difference between DOS and the Recovery Env.  Is the RE windows based?

And Windows has native drivers to run the SCSI card.  It appears in the system bios as a boot-able device.  During POST I can enter the SCSI card's bios to set SCSI specific settings, like which drive to boot to, etc. 

In any event, I'm still looking to somehow get an image from the existing IDE drive to a SCSI drive/s. 

Thanks for your help with this!  and sorry for the long-winded novel!

~shawn

Crono,

re imaging IDE to SATA. A member had problems doing this but it may have been BIOS related. In general, is this an easy thing to do? How do you add SATA drivers?