[RTTY] Off Subject Help Needed - Ghosting a hard drive?

[Robert Chudek - K0RC]

Hello Don,

I think this would be a good use of RTTY reflector bandwidth because 
every one of us relies on their hard drives and may run into this issue. 
I'll keep my reply short. It's my philosophy. Others may have a 
different opinion.

If you have been using that HDD for 8 years you are "thinking right"... 
it's going to die so it's better to replace it while everything is 
playing well. Yes, you can clone a drive, but depending upon the 
software, it may only be able to clone (for example) your 40-Gb drive 
onto a 500-Gb drive as a 40-Gb partition. The remaining 460-Gb would 
become a D: drive or could be chopped up into smaller partitions. Better 
cloning software allows you to image a bootable 40-Gb onto a 500-Gb 
without partitioning it.

But... I have always gone through the pain of physically removing the 
existing drive and setting it aside. Then install the new drive and get 
it up and running with a fresh install of the OS and patches. This will 
give  you better performance by creating a fresh registry, as well as 
the better HDD performance.

Once I get the basics running, I will install the original drive as D: 
and then create a folder on the new drive. Call it "Old Drive" or 
something. I copy everything off the old drive into that folder on the 
new drive. Then I can cull through everything easily by dragging and 
dropping files (not programs).

When I have several weeks under my belt and I am satisfied, I reformat 
the old drive and use it for a backup. Well, at least until the data on 
the new drive outgrows the capacity of the older drive!

Your question was timely, as I just formatted my old drive earlier today 
and will be launching a fresh backup to run overnight.

73 de Bob - KØRC in MN

------------------------------------------------------------------------


On 3/11/2011 8:55 PM, Don Hill AA5AU wrote:
> My main shack computer is a Dell Dimension 4600 running XP Pro that is probably going on 8-10 years old?  I don't know how long I've
> had it.  I'd like to replace the hard drive before it dies.  I have no reason to think it will die soon, it works great, but logic
> tells me I should probably do something about it before it does.  I've lost hard drives in other computers in the past and as we all
> know, it's not a nice thing to have happen.
>
> When we lost the hard drive in my wife's computer (we back most of everything up on a portable drive), I bought a Western Digital
> 320 GB PATA drive and installed it in her PC, reinstalled XP and loaded everything back on.  It was kid of a pain but it all worked.
> So I bought the same drive for my PC (both require a parallel drive).  I do have a secondary drive cable in my PC.
>
> What I'd prefer to do is to "ghost" the new drive from my existing drive if that is what I need to do.  I'd just like to replace my
> existing drive with the new drive so it's bootable and has all the programs already installed on it without having to reinstall
> everything.  What I read on the Internet is a bit confusing and contradicting and I would prefer to hear advice from knowledgeable
> computer gurus here on the reflector that I trust.  I think I have Ghost by Symantec on a disk somewhere as I used to use Norton
> Internet Security or perhaps there are programs out there that are better suited for this.  I just don't know.
>
> Please reply directly.  Thanks!  And sorry for the rtty-unrelated bandwidth.
>
> 73, Don AA5AU
> http://www.aa5au.com
> http://www.rttycontesting.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> RTTY mailing list
> RTTY at contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/rtty
>