May 20, 2004

10:40 AM

Another boooooring computer question - sorry!

How do I clone a HD in a win2k system? My system's boot hd is a 20g 5400 rpm. I'd like to swap it for a 20 g 7200 rpm which is sitting at the moment in an external firewire enclosure. I also have 150g in an internal RAID array.

More inside ...
posted by magullo to (6 comments total)

I've been looking up stuff on google for several hours now. I've found this free app which does it http://www.xxclone.com/.

However, several questions remain. First of all, I want to make clear that, if at all possible, I'd like to clone the HD while the target is still in the external firewire enclosure, then do the actual physical swap.

One of the reasons for that is that I am not sure if the CPU's power supply is going to be able to deliver the extra amps required. I could unplug the data-only raid disks for the time being. Which points to reason 2 to do it while the HD os in the enclosure: keeping the physical messing around and potential BIOS changes to a minimum (for comfort's sake ony, I built the system so I am not intimidated by it at all).

From what I've read, it seems like the actual cloning necessarily involves a re-booting step(s) which are required to make the target bootable as well. To that extent, the firewire drive appears in the win2k disk management utility as a logical drive in an extended partition. While xxclone complains about it not being bootable and the necessity to boot from a third disk.

Both drives are formatted using FAT32 ... and ideally the end result would see the computer booting from the 7200 rpm drive while the 5400 would be placed in the external firewire enclosure and reformatted. Oh, and the box has no diskette drives, only CD-R and DVD-R ones (needless to say, I can boot from them if necessary, and also create a boot disk).

Any sequential description of the process would be greatly appreciated.
posted by magullo at 10:59 AM on May 20, 2004

I just used this product last night:

http://www.drive-image.com/

Is this enough of a sequential description?
posted by sequential at 11:21 AM on May 20, 2004

8?)

Thanks, but I was also hoping to avoid the image step. I know I'm being a tiny bit picky, but I don't understand why the request is so unreasonable. If the standard is copy+compression, why is a simple dump such a hassle?

/Maybe a "why" question rather than a "how-to" one ...
posted by magullo at 11:41 AM on May 20, 2004

It does support "copy disk to disk". I just checked in the user interface for you. Though I haven't tried it, I believe it does exactly what you are describing.

This product is rumored to be just as good, but does not have a demo version.
posted by sequential at 11:52 AM on May 20, 2004

Use Norton Ghost. I haven't had much luck with Powerquest's products. From this page:

Norton Ghost 2003 and Symantec Ghost 8.0 are compatible with devices that connect to your computer through a FireWire connection.

It's not free of course. I could suggest ED2K or Bittorrent or filesearching.com, but that would be wrong.
posted by estey at 12:38 PM on May 20, 2004

Also you don't have to worry about not having enough juice left in the power supply should you want to take the drive out of the enclosure and then clone. All you need is an old AT power supply (the kind that actually has a power switch (those were the days)) and you set that outside of your case and plug it in to the wall. Then take a power cable off that AT power supply and plug it into the drive that needs power. Works great.
posted by estey at 12:53 PM on May 20, 2004