4th grade level question about hard drive ghosting.

[Pat Whatley]

Yes, I've googled this until I'm too dang confused to know which way to go.

My main design station that I lovingly built with my own two hands, and painstakingly loaded with every program I use on a regular basis, and carefully selected only the fonts I'd really use and essentially turned into one screaming fast intuitive money making machine is currently dealing with an oncoming hard drive failure.

The drive periodically starts clicking, then the whole system freezes. When that happens sometimes I have to start it up four or five times before it will actually work but once it does everything is perfect for a week or so.

It took me a couple of months to get everything on this system set up just the way I wanted it and I really don't want to deal with that again if I don't have to.

My question is this....I have a brand new 1tb drive sitting on the shelf. Can I stick it in the computer as a second drive then use a ghosting program like Shadow Copy to copy the entire drive, operating system and all? Can I copy drive C to drive D then remove the C drive and boot directly from the copy? Is that how ghosting works? Assuming my current C drive lasts long enough to transfer all its files how long does a procedure like this take. I'm probably looking at 200 GB of files needing to be copied.

(All my sign files, quotes, approvals, design files, fonts and the like are already backed up, by the way....I'm only half stupid.)

 

[SignBurst PCs]

Pat, yes, you can do that. There are several programs that can do just what you described. Norton Ghost springs to mind, but I believe it has been discontinued.

Also, if it is a recent version of Windows, you can "create an image" to another drive (internal or external) using the built in backup utility. This isn't exactly what you described as it is more of a "backup image" and not a live, bootable drive. After making the backup image, you would replace the hard drive and restore from your backup image. It is very simple as well and will restore all of your programs and settings. Basically, it makes a "snapshot" of your current drive that can be restored to a new drive in the event of catastrophe. As a matter of fact, you can schedule the backup image to be created daily, weekly, monthly, etc. I schedule mine daily so that in the event of failure, I never lose more than a day.

Here is a little more info: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/back-up-your-programs-system-settings-and-files

 

[Gene@mpls]

I clone all of my system drives with True Image- very easy and if a drive fails or becomes badly compromised I can have the
puter back up in 10 minutes. I use all Dell Optiplex puters and have even switched system drives from other puters successfully.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

I clone all of my system drives with True Image- very easy and if a drive fails or becomes badly compromised I can have the
puter back up in 10 minutes. I use all Dell Optiplex puters and have even switched system drives from other puters successfully.

Yep, Arconis makes a good one too. That is the other that I was trying to remember last night.

Honestly though, if it is Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8, the free, built in backup utility is pretty robust with both scheduled file backups and system images.

Better get it imaged though Pat. You sound like you are on borrowed time.

 

[John Butto]

Fourth grade reply: "hit that esc key real hard a couple of times"

 

[SignProPlus-Chip]

I had a hard rive die on me once. It haunted my computer case for years until the exorcism.

 

[Pat Whatley]

Fourth grade reply: "hit that esc key real hard a couple of times"

I've always found that if that didn't work it was because I wasn't hitting the esc key hard enough.

 

[round man]

4th grade reply is yes you can do it ,...but,...if the hard drive is starting to fail some of the data may have already become corrupt,...thus your image is going to be corrupt,.....this is a good time to remind folks,...when you get a new system tweeked and running just like you want it,.....BACK IT UP!!!!!!

 

[choucove]

Acronis True Image is the utility we have used to do this for the majority of instances. There is a bootable disk that will allow you to completely duplicate one drive to another, but this cannot be done while you are currently running your Windows environment, it must be done from the bootable disk. But the interface is very easy to navigate and straight forward.

If you don't wish to purchase the full version of Acronis True Image, there might be a free version available from your hard drive vendor's support site to use when migrating data to a new drive. I know that Western Digital and Seagate both offered a basic version of Acronis True Image for disk cloning and you could get the image to burn a CD with right from their website.

 

[kffernandez]

the image tools mentioned by the other posters are all good solutions. but if i were you, i would remove your clicking hard disk from your cpu, and slap it on as a secondary drive on another desktop asap. this allows you to prioritize the transfer of your most critical files first without creating any undue stress on your data hard drive. ghosting will read all your data, and will necessarily stress it. and that clicking sound is probably the head of your hard disk slamming to either the end of read area or onto your actual magnetic platter.

your hard disk will die along with all your data in the very near future.

kelly

 

[visual800]

Signbust thanks for the cloning tips. I had bought a 1TB external hardive earlier this year. Loved it. hooked it up and it was fast. Got it out monday and it had crashed, pi$$ed me off! There was no warning, no clicking nothing to indicate last time I used it it would do this.

Ripped it out of it plastic case and hooked it up via a usb cable hooked up to its sata ports and still nothing. Im good about having 2-3 copies of everyhting but I did lose some stuff. There is just no rhyme or reason why these things fail. and Ive had every brand crash so its not a branding thing

 

[knucklehead]

How would one go about cloning the entire C drive of XP Pro. I've got a 500 gig external drive, have about 80 gigs of stuff on the C drive

Tried the Norton Ghost thing one time a while back, didn't do so great. It ghosted about 50% of the drive, it seemed.