Mirroring a hard drive

blorg

I'm thinking of upgrading my 120gb boot disk to 250gb. How easy would this be, if I want to avoid reinstalling Windows, applications, etc. I think I have Ghost somewhere (at work) - will this work even with a different size hard drive? Is it easy?

Bogger77

It should work, I've done it loads of times (never gone from 100+ to 200+ though), just remember to be careful with your partition sizes, also I find a good defrag before you image is good idea.

do you have enough space to store the image? it'll be rather large I presume, almost the same size as the ammount of info you have on the hard drive

blorg

Well I was hoping that I could just plug the new (blank) drive in as a secondary and copy directly onto it? Is that not how it can work?

Khannie

That wont work if you intend booting from the drive. You may copy everything over, but the master boot record (MBR) doesn't come with it. Ghost is your man if you have it.

blorg

I was aware that I couldn't just copy everything over and that I'd have to use Ghost. My question was as to whether I can just plug both drives in and have Ghost create a duplicate on the blank - e.g. there doesn't have to be 'somewhere else' where Ghost creates its image first?

Khannie

Ah, ok. Your post was ambiguous.

I've only ever created ghost images on DVD, then used that to put it onto the same drive that I'm wiping. Can't help.

Syth

This is easy to do in Linux. You could get plug both drives into the PC, and put Knoppix in. It will boot from the CD, not touching your hard drive(s). There is a great programme called dd that's included in every linux distribution. It basically copies disks (dd stands for disk dump). So all you'd have to do is load up Knoppix, open up a terminal and type in "dd if=/dev/hd? of=/dev/hd?"

The question marks are to replaced with a letter of the alphabet depending on which on you want to copy from and which to copy to. (You don't want to copy your new blank 250GB onto your old 120GB ) Knoppix will discover your hard drives, it should display 2, your old and your new. A bit of poking will tell you which is which (your old one is probably hda), so open a terminal (I think right click on the desktop and it should be there AFAIR). Now assuming your old harddrive is at /dev/hda and your new one is at /dev/hdb, then type "umount /dev/hda<ENTER>" then "umount /dev/hdb<ENTER>". That's just telling Knoppix is 'eject' them, so they will not be used. Then to copy all you'd type is "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb<ENTER>", then wait. It will start at the start of your old harddrive and copy, bit for bit to your new harddrive.

That's all.

(BTW if you don't have knoppix, you can download the 700MB ISO from ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/knoppix.org/KNOPPIX_V3.6-2004-08-16-EN.iso, or I could copy on of mine and post it to you.)

gobby

blorg wrote:

I was aware that I couldn't just copy everything over and that I'd have to use Ghost. My question was as to whether I can just plug both drives in and have Ghost create a duplicate on the blank - e.g. there doesn't have to be 'somewhere else' where Ghost creates its image first?

Pretty sure this is possible. I ghosted (using Norton Ghost 2003) a 60gig bootable to a 160gig with both drives in my machine. Takes an age but well worth the wait.

[edit] That is, just the two drives in my machine [/edit]

dubdvd

yes it is possible ive done it but be careful very careful and create a rescue floppy disc cos it boots up in dos and clones it over to the new drive ..but more than once for some reason it lost the master drives boot files before it cloned and i couldnt get back into it so i lost everything but if i had of had a rescue disk i would have got it back booting id say ..but the story has a good ending i got it all back by using a data recovery program