Image of Hard Drive to second Hard Drive

[mad1]

Can I install a second hard drive,as slave, and make a image of the primary drive onto the second hard drive? I suspect that my hard drive might fail some time in the near future and I would like to be able to swap drives when this occurs. What would be a good program to accomplish this?

I am using win xp pro for a OS.

[Martoch]

Norton Ghost is perfect for what you want to do.

PC World Review with screenshot

[mad1]

Norton Ghost is perfect for what you want to do.

PC World Review with screenshot

Thanks

[PresterJohn]

acronis true image does it better than norton (they were the first to offer on the fly imaging and incremental imaging) and it's cheaper, too.

http://www.acronis.com

symantec post-sale support is lousy...

[elroy]

Image the #1 drive to the #2 drive.
Then disconnect the #1 drive and install the #2 to make sure your image is there and works. Then remove #2 and re-connect #1. You probably don't want to leave #2 in the machine while continueing to use #1. There are many programs that will do this but Ghost is by far the most widely used. However if you don't own Ghost you can use the utility disk that comes with most retail hard drives. Boot with the floppy or cd and go to Advanced Options> Copy Entire Partition. However the utilities like Maxblast may hang on bad sectors while Ghost has an option to copy bad sectors and all.
I am a fan of the Acronis products also. I use True Image to back up my drives.

[Martoch]

Thanks for the info PresterJohn...I've used Ghost to force clone entire disks that even had bad sectors as elroy mentioned. Does acronis have a similar option?

Less $$$ =

[mad1]

Thanks for the info PresterJohn...I've used Ghost to force clone entire disks that even had bad sectors as elroy mentioned. Does acronis have a similar option?

Less $$$ =

Why would you want to clone bad sectors?

What about Drive Image from Powerquest? I have used partition magic from powerquest and it worked well.

[Martoch]

It clones the information from the bad sectors, it doesn't create bad sectors on the new drive.


As elroy mentioned, some cloning programs will skip over the information contained in bad sectors...so you don't get whatever files are contained in those areas.

Mmmmk?

[elroy]

Why would you want to clone bad sectors?

What about Drive Image from Powerquest? I have used partition magic from powerquest and it worked well.

Better to clone a bad sector than to have the copy process freeze up and stop at the bad sector.
Ghost 9 is actually Drive Image in disguise. Ghost 9 is not the same as earlier versions. http://ghost.radified.com/norton_ghost_90.htm

[Chuckiechan]

Ghost is great, but there is one caution. You need to run the integrety check after you create you image.

Naturally, when you need it, it will fail! You do however have the ability to get into the files with an Explorer - type interface to pull "my doc's" and whatever else you need.

I got caught short last crash.

Edit: First defrag both drives, then clone. I tried the forced clone routein and had no luck - feel free to let me on the secret handshake!

[rwinegar]

I don't think you want to create an image. You're talking about swapping hard drives. I think you want to clone one hard drive to another one. That's what I would do. I have used Casper XP for this many times. Each of my computers has two hard drives, one containing an image of the other created by Acronis True Image. So long as the drives are working restoring an image is an option. Each of my drives is also cloned to another drive in an external enclosure. If a drive should physically break, it is easy to swap the broken drive for it's clone. Drives cloned using Casper XP are bootable. This method saved my bacon on several occasions.