Mirror system drive and move

[amos]

Hi all.

What is the best way to mirror a system drive so that when I change to boot from the new drive it will all work.

I'm never that confident about doing this sort of stuff with Win2K

Here goes.

I have a single FAT32 drive, which is the main system drive in my machine currently on the main IDE channel.

I have an NTFS drive sitting on one of the raid ide channels, currently containing nothing important.
I have another NTFS drive sitting on another of the raid ide channels, which currently contains the backups of the FAT32 drive using microsft backup.


I think my main drive might be going down.

i want to mirror the FAT32 on the empty NTFS drive _in such a way as to ensure I can boot from it_. That is if there is some boot partition stuff or other things like that etc etc it must all go.

In the future I probably will cut the backup on the second drive and change it to RAID mirror the first.

I am not entirely sure that the main drive is faulty, so I don't want to throw that away, and don't want to purchase a replacement right now.

Is there a simple way I can do what I want. I am really uncertain on how to ensure the new drive will work fine as a system drive? I am really short of time at the moment, so the simpler, and more reliable, the better.

Please be clear if you have actually done what you describe, or if you just think it would be a good way.

Thanks in advance.

[John Prophet]

Well, normally when you think of mirror, you think of Norton Ghost. The problem there is that it will just copy it over as an exact copy..so it will be fat32 also.

And if you copy it over exactly and then boot with it still in the system it will probably change the boot.ini and give you two boot options (as it detected that you have 2 windows installs)

If you are just going to take the first drive out then its simply a matter of booting with a Norton Ghost boot floppy...and using "disk to disk" copy. When its done you then simply take the first (bad) drive out and put the second drive in its place, presumably as primary master. It will be an EXACT copy so it will boot up just fine.

JP

[amos]

Thanks John - I don't have Norton Ghost, and I am guessing there must be a standard way to do this stuff?

Actually, I ma now pretty sure the HD is caput - a little bit of heat, and the world goes amiss.

I have a recent backup, which I could restore to another drive. This will then have all the info I want on it. But here is another question. Is there a simple way to make this the main (only) bootable drive in the machine. I have never properly understood this.

Otherwise, is there a simple way to get stuff off a backup (Win2k) using the microsoft backup tool to create a new bootable drive without installing a fresh MS copy first (the old one still works (just) so long as I don't touch the main hard drive much (it keeps trying to scandisk it when I boot up though, which is a sure killer!

PS we are talking about 60GB of stuff.

[John Prophet]

"Otherwise, is there a simple way to get stuff off a backup (Win2k) using the microsoft backup tool to create a new bootable drive without installing a fresh MS copy first"

not sure about that...I have never used msoft backup to restore stuff.

[B71655]

I have copied and run a win2k drive to both larger and smaller drives with a program called xxcopy. Worked like a charm. Read everything on the site and decide. Keep that backup available. A bad drive will have bad sectors, right? your'a gonna try to copy them, too. Worked for me.
http://www.xxcopy.com/

[elroy]

Most of the drive utilities from the drive manufacturers website's include a partition copy utility. Boot with the drive utility floppy and go to advanced options and select copy partition.

[amos]

Thanks all. A few things to be working with there.

Amos

[jmichna]

Amos,
You may be able to find a vendor selling Norton System Works 2003 (OEM, CD only) which contains Ghost. In the US, I can find it for about $25US, and you also get Norton Antivirus 2003 (and the Norton's Utilities... I tend not to use these) to boot.

Ghost is a really easy way to do entire drive B/Us, and is relatively quick and painless.

I have twin 45gb HDs (NTFS format) in a RAID-0 (stripping) array. I periodically back up the entire array (partitioned into C:, D: and E to a third, 80gb HD using Ghost. Ghost will create a Ghost boot disk, for B/U restoration.

When (not if...) one the of the drives in my RAID array goes fubar, and I lose all my data, I'll just replace the bad drive, recreate the RAID array in BIOS, and restore my entire system from the ghost B/U.

[amos]

Thanks

BTW Lets get this right. You have a RAID 0 (IDE I presume) set up which you have then partitioned! So why RAID 0 in the first place? You are aware I hope that all the benchmarks suggest that UDMA RAID 0 drives (despite the hype) tend to be slower than unraided drives, across most controllers? This is not true with SCSI or _very_ old IDE drives BTW. So the only benefit of RAID 0 is the large drive size. But as you partitioned that, all you have managed to do is double the risk of data loss and slow your drives down

Not that you asked... I am just being nosey and abnoxious