I've suffered through many hard drive crashes, some of my own and many that happened to other people. Recovery is never easy and it always results in data losses. Often, people lose all data including the operating system, all installed software, and irreplaceable personal files. Getting a system up and running again with a new hard drive and restoring lost software can take many hours - even days - depending on how much data is on hand and how much must be downloaded from the Internet, such as drivers for hardware that must be identified first, plus other software restorations. Personal data that is not backed up is just gone. You don't know the importance of keeping a current backup until you've lost it all.
I tried several methods of backing up my hard drive and I was never pleased with any of them until I began cloning. Once I was set up for cloning, I found it very simple and complete.
WARNING: you need to read warnings and directions found in your cloning program's instruction files. I'm using Norton Ghost 2003 on my Windows 98SE (now dual booting with Ubuntu Linux). I've also cloned Windows XP for other people and had no problems. But there is no guarantee that your clone will be successful or that you won't totally wipe out and lose all your data. Proceed with cloning at your own risk.
My first cloning experience was a little scarey. After reading all the warnings and cautions I wasn't sure I could do it. Once finished, I tested each of my drives and found that I had two bootable drives containing identical data. Great!
Subsequent cloning sessions are a simple routine. Preparing for and getting past that first session is
the hurdle. Here's how I started:
My existing drive was an 80Gb drive containing all my data (which adds up less than 20Gb of used space and about 60Gb of free space). This drive is divided into 4 partitions, C:, D:, E:, F:. Update: the drive now also contains Ubuntu Linux ... root, usr and home partitions (ext 3) and swap.
Ghost 2003 successfully clones the entire drive. I'm not revising this entire site to reflect that but keep in mind - it works.
I bought a second hard drive, a 40Gb, (plenty of room for my 20Gb + of data). Then I prepared
After preparing the new 40Gb drive, I connected it as a Slave drive, told Norton Ghost to clone all partitions of my main drive to the Slave drive and in a few minutes I had an exact copy of everything: partitions, operating system, drivers, programs and all my personal data. Then I set up the new 40Gb
as my Master drive and disconnected the 80Gb for a standby. It feels good to have that kind of hard drive security.
Every two to four weeks I simply reverse the process: I connect the 80Gb as a Slave, tell Norton to clone the 'in service' 40Gb (now containing all my data including new stuff) to the 80Gb, then I disconnect the 40Gb while I use the 80Gb 'in service'. I continue cloning and swapping drives every few weeks so I always have an exact copy of my hard drive as it was on cloning day. I've been doing this for a few months now and it has already saved me from what would have been, two total losses (one from a hard drive malfunction, another from a bad mistake I made (oops!) while using three different operating systems on the same drive, which worked fine until I started experimenting).
You don't have to repartition and reformat each time you clone. Norton Ghost takes care repartitioning and overwrites all data on the destination drive during the cloning process.
using Web Studio. For questions or comments please send Email.
A cloning mistake to avoid.
I recently had a hard drive problem that caused me to quickly set up for cloning. I had an older standby drive that was still usable so I connected it to hold my data. After cloning began, I knew I had about a half-hour to wait so I left the room to get a cup of coffee. I returned to the cloning operation after about ten minutes and WOW! The clone was finished and the computer had already rebooted. I was in a hurry but I thought I had better check the cloned drive to make sure I had a bootable clone of the original hard drive.
I connected the clone as primary master and it booted fine. I checked for logical drives D, E, and F. I was surprised to find I had no logical drives, only C. What happened to D, E, and F? In the past, if there was a primary partition C, Ghost automatically created logical D, E, and F but this time it didn’t. I thought that perhaps on some older drives Ghost wouldn’t make the logical drives so I repartitioned the drive myself using FDISK, and began the cloning process again. And again, I left the room for a few minutes. And again I ended up with only a C: drive.
I began the cloning process for the third time and this time I didn’t leave the room. I sat in front of my monitor and watched every move. Partition C: finished. Before logical D began, a message flashed on my screen that said, "A bad sector has been encountered. What do you want to do?" and there were some choices that I could make but before I chose one, Ghost closed and rebooted. I checked the clone again and again I found only drive C was cloned.
I ran Scandisk on the standby drive and corrected the problem, cloned again, and this time Ghost did it’s usual good job.
Moral of this story: computers do many things faster and better than humans but without supervision they may not do what you want. If you begin a process and leave the area, your computer may run amuck!
