New HDs-cloning pitfalls? (1 Viewer)

[Jim_F]

I'll be installing a pair of 200GB SATA drives soon. I plan to run them in RAID 0.

I'd like to hold off a little while before my next fresh install of my OS (XP Pro) and all of my applications. Is there anything I need to know about cloning my boot drive with Norton Ghost (which I already have installed)? Is it easy to label the new drive as "C:"? Anywhere I'm likely to screw up if I'm not careful?

TIA

 

[Rob Gillespie]

If you want to clone your current XP installation to a new drive(s) then I think you'll need to get familiar with the Sysprep utility. It's in the Microsoft site, just do a search.

Ghosting XP from one drive to another can be fraught with problems - most commonly refusal to boot up afterwards. Not everyone seems to have the same problems though - it's something I've never got to work.

I presume for your RAID0 system you have a plan for regular backups?

 

[WayneO]

Which version of Norton Ghost? Only the newest has support for RAID and I found out the hard way. Also, if you do try a reimage to the RAID setup, make sure you do it with the boot disks and not through Windows, much less chance of problems. And finally let me say PowerQuest's Drive Image 2002 is a great, reliable program for reimaging. I've done about a dozen reimages to my RAID with nary a hiccup.

 

[Jim_F]

Probably not the latest version of Norton Ghost. Looks like I have some homework to do. It might even be easier, as well as best, to do a fresh install after all.

I have precious little to back up. What there is of it, I keep copied on a separate physical drive and/or removable media.

 

[dan fritzen]

Jim if you are currently running your drive off the raid then changing it two HD's in raid 0 will work, but if you are using a different port/EIDE to connect you will have to ghost and modify your boot.ini, which is not hard but you need to understand how the boot.ini works.

I use Ghost and love it, but it is easy to do the wrong thing, i.e. instead of dumping your HD to a file you load a partition onto a HD.

 

[Jim_F]

Thanks to all for the advice. As it turned out, I wasn't able to get my machine to recognize drives on both the SATA and IDE controllers simultaneously (despite trying a variety of BIOS settings) I ended up doing a fresh install and am almost back to normal now, except a bit faster and with tons of drive space. Due to some form of mental vapor lock, I kept thinking that my RAID 0 volume was going to show up as a single drive of half the total capacity, like a RAID 1 would.

I ended up taking out an unneeded CD drive while I was in there, which eliminated the need for my old Ultra 66 controller card, and I'm down to 2 physical internal drives from the former 3. It's not every day that I can both simplify and improve my machine.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

I just got a 250GB drive to upgrade the 120GB drive in my HTPC. I had the 120GB drive set up with a 20GB system partition and the rest for data, and I wanted to do the same with the 250. But once I get my system partition copied to the new drive, I can't get it to boot. It starts to boot and then as Windows XP loads drivers it gets the BSOD and then reboots so fast I can't even see what the blue screen said. I'm sure it has something to do with the 137GB barrier, but I know everything I have supports 48-bit LBA. I'm not finished trying everything in my bag of tricks but it sure is frustrating. A fresh install of XP would probably do it but I'm trying to avoid that because it's only trading one headache for another.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Sounds like you need SP1 to be present on the XP install from the outset. There is a method of 'slipstreaming' the SP1 files into the normal CD:

http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsX...p1-bootcd.html

That said, I installed XP no-SP quite happily on an IBM 180gb drive with no problems.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

I've had SP1 on this system from the start. It's just over a year old.

But now I've got a worse problem. The motherboard is dead.

 

[dan fritzen]

are some drivers on the data partition? If so try a disk copy and not a partition copy see if that works.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

All my drivers are (were) in c:windowssystem32drivers, right where Windows put them.

Looks like I'll have to get a new motherboard and fresh install XP anyway.

 

[Wayne Bundrick]

Update: I got a new motherboard, then I did a repair-install of XP from the CD (pressing R to repair at the second prompt instead of the first) on the system partition of the 250GB drive (which had been ghosted from the 120GB just before my old motherboard died). The repair install worked. And then I discovered that the particular CD I used was original XP instead of my XP SP1 CD. It worked anyway, but then I had to install SP1 and a shitload of updates. However, all my applications and data are intact, and up and running on my new 250 GB drive.

My new motherboard didn't have onboard sound, so my impulse purchase of a SB Audigy 2 ZS has suddenly justified itself.

The 120GB is going to become a video partition on the Linux MythTV PVR I'm almost finished building.