Possible To Back-Up HardDrive Onto Another HardDrive?

[Saner]

^^ As above really

Just spent a day rebuild a PC and recovering everything.

Rather than back everything up on DVD is it possible to copy the hard drive, and copy it to my spare one in the same PC.

Should the current hard drive fail i can just boot up on the slave drive?
Possible?

Saner

 

[biojo]

yes some thing like norton ghost will do it , i did it when i had my 30g hd with winxp on , copied full drive to a 200g , then booted into windows off the new one.

that gives u option now to

copy drive to drive
drive to image
drive to multiple dvdrs or cdrs

its a good proggy pritty simple to use , just make a boot disk and its about as simple as that

 

[Evil Ally]

Another good proggy is acronis. You could also consider raid? Your motherboard might already have it if you built the PC yourself.

 

[biojo]

i thought if it was done through raid it had to be of 2 drives of the same size

might be wrong

 

[unofficialPete]

slave the HD (plug it in) onto the rebuilt PC and copy and paste?

 

[Evil Ally]

i thought if it was done through raid it had to be of 2 drives of the same size

might be wrong

You can use mismatched drives. e.g. if you set up a mirror with a 160gb and 100gb drive then your raid container will be 100gb. The extra 60 on the other drive is wasted. The other advantage of doing this would be that you don't have to worry about keeping images up to date.

 

[Evil Ally]

slave the HD (plug it in) onto the rebuilt PC and copy and paste?

Unfortunately this won't create a bootable drive.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

Unfortunately this won't create a bootable drive.

Also files like the NTuser.dat won't copy because the OS protects it because it gets updated all the time.

 

[FiDoDiDo]

The only two way I can think of is ghost or a physical hard drive cloner (which you probably won't have).