HD Ghosting ?

[jutah]

Hi all

I have a ghosting question. Recently my HD gave me a MBR error message. After messing around for a while I was able to get the drive back up. Now I want to ghost (Norton 2002) the drive and restore these images onto another drive b4 my one totally goes up. I have some questions b4 I go wild and start doing this b\c I really don't want to screw it up.

1. Drive A (the one going bad) has three partitions C, D, and E. C is ~2GB, D ~30GB, and E is ~10GB. Something is wronge with D already and I think it is trashed so I won't be ghosting that one. Drive B (the good one) is just one partition C ~40GB. I don't think you can restore an image on the same drive you save them to right? So I am guessing I will first have to partition Drive B into 3 parts C, E, and a temp partition big enough to hold both images from Drive A. Does this sound right? If so what is the easist way to do the partitions? I forgot how . If this is not the right way does anybody know what I should do? If all possible I would like to increase the size of the C once it is on the new Drive.

Thanks,

Jutah

[John Prophet]

ok, first of all....is there anything on drive B that needs to be saved?

If not..what you could try first of all is just copying the whole drive a over to drive b.

If you go that route you could see if the "d" partition on a drive fixes itself etc. You could test it out a bit with "a" removed from the system to see if it ghosted over correctly.

If you dont want to mess with that method...just decide how big you want the partitions to be for "c" and "e".

Lets say you want them to be 20g each....no prob. What you do at that point is run "fdisk"...you can just run it while booted into windows if you are booted off the "a" hard drive. So you run fdisk and first off delete whatever partition is already on the 'b" drive and put back whatever partition sizes you want..in my example it was 2 20g partitions.

Ok, then boot off of the ghost floppy and choose "partition to partition" and choose the "c" partition on the first drive as the source and the first partition on the second drive as the destination....(im not sure what letter it will be shown as)...but you do have to be careful to make sure you are picking the right source and destination or else you could end up with 2 blank hard drives, lol. In our example it would be making sure you had the 2g as the source and the 20g as the destination.

Then you may have to reboot off the floppy (dont boot into windows out of curiousity in between here)..and this time do "partition to partition" but pick the "e" as the source and the second partition of the second drive as the destination.

you didnt say what version of windows you have..if its W98 or WinMe you may have to do an "fdisk /mbr" to get it to boot off the new drive.

Either way, disconnect the old "a" drive and hook the newly ghosted drive up as master on the primary IDe channel.

Should be straight at that point.

Of course you might try this first.

Boot off of the ghost floppy and do "partition to image" and choose "c" and for the destination choose your cdburner...that will burn an image of the "c" partition to a cd in case something goes wrong later etc. Not a bad idea. You could also do it for the "e" partition.

JP

[jutah]

Thanks for the reply

I have tried to back the images up on CD b4, but they seem to be too big. For example ghost tells me to insert an other media. Is there anyway to compress the image to make sure it fits on the CD or is this jus the way it goes?

Thanks,

Jutah