Qustions for Drive Image 2002 users (1 Viewer)

[John Wilson]

I am asking for advice/help on using DI 2002 on my wife's computer. She has essential info that if lost would set back her home business greatly. I have configured her system as follows:

Dell Dimension 4100 PIII 866MHz
WinXP Pro SP1
Primary HDD is 20GB on C: and 40GB on D:
Secondary HDD is 80GB on E:

At this point there is no data on the D: partition and in retrospect, I should have made just one 60GB C: partition.:b

What I would like to do with DI 2002 is COPY the entire primary HDD to the secondary HDD so that if the primary dies, all I would have to do is swap IDE cables and change the jumper to Master and reboot. In DI, it has a Copy function. Is this what it will do? The manual is sketchy IMHO.

Also, I'd like to delete the D: partition and expand the C: partition if possible. I'm thinking that if I COPY just the existing C: partition to the seconday drive and allow it to expand to fill all of the secondary's 80GB, I could then use it as the primary drive and find another 80GB to use as a backup (80GB drives are getting cheap these days!)

Any other suggestions? I'd rather not fool with image files as they appear to take a long time to restore and require booting with rescue disks. Isn't my plan alittle more straight-forward? Maybe I'm not seeing this correctly as I'm definitely a Drive Image newbie

Sorry for the rambling and thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Your idea sounds OK John. I've not used version 2002 but version 5.0 did not have a 'copy' function which is why I dropped it in favour of Ghost 2003 (which is better all-round really, but that's another thread).

I'd rather not fool with image files as they appear to take a long time to restore and require booting with rescue disks

I would get used to using them as they can provide an invaluable backup facility. They shouldn't need rescue disks at all as DI's Windows interface should be able to take care of all the work, rebooting into DOS when needed.

 

[Ken Chan]

Sounds like what you want is another PowerQuest program: DriveCopy. Ghost may have similar features.

//Ken

 

[John Wilson]

Thanks for the replies so far. I picked Drive Image 2002 based on some reviews that I read. I don't think I'm going to go to Ghost at this point but I'll keep it in mind. In the meantime, have any Drive Image 2002 USERS implemented the Copy Drives option? If so, what options did you use. ie. hide source or destination partions after copy? What I want to do is have an exact copy of my primary drive on the secondary one. I would like the OS to ignore the secondary drive so that if the primary were to die, I could power down, change cabling and jumper settings and reboot with the "copied" drive as the primary master. I'm just not sure what Options to select in DI to do this.

Sorry for the long post and the newbie questions but I can't afford to make a mistake here:b

 

[AndrewDSmith]

John - You've got the basic idea. You want to hide the "destination" drive when you are using the Copy Drive method. This will give you an exact copy of the source drive on the destination drive, but hide the destination drive so that when the computer boots up, it doesn't get confused as to which drive to boot from.

But, in case of failure, you will still need to use the rescue disk to boot into the Drive Image program in DOS. If something happens to the C: drive, what you will need to do is boot from the rescue floppy, change the destination drive to "Active" and set the origional C: drive to "Hidden." Once this is done, you can reboot the machine and it will load on the 80GB drive, just like it was on the 60GB drive.

Once you can boot back into the machine normally, then you can go through the routine of switching jumper and cable settings. But, it's worhtless to go through those motions if you can't do it through the DOS version of DI. That's why I recommend that step first.

By the way, the Copy Drive option is just the Drive Copy program built into the Drive Image program. Good luck with everything.