Cloning a hard drive

[Zelandakh]

I have a 10GB hard disk that is playing up - it won't always spin up and causes Win98 to freeze regularly.

I also have a 4.3GB hard disk ready to take the data. The big hard disk has a 2000MB partition and an unformatted rest of it. I only want the 2000MB partition to go over and my copy of Drive Copy won't let me do it as the new disk is smaller than the old one.

Can I use any command line program from floppy that will duplicate the whole drive from C to D or vice versa that will keep the long filenames and allow me to boot off the new drive?

 

[study77]

hi friend

what brand of harddisk u have

no prob. goto the site of the hard disk manufacturer & download the Diskmanager/or the the driver they provide
it will help you to clone your harddisks

 

[Zelandakh]

They are Seagate drives.

Drive copy only copies whole disk drives (hence the name) rather than just partitions.

I used partition magic which allows partition copying.

Can I give myself a star?

 

[Brianc2k]

Once partition is set on receiving drive you could try the fameous hickery command. You need the pointer set to the source partition such as C:> and the pointer set on the receiving drive such as D:> Then with a path to Windows 98 subdirectory so the system can locate xcoy32.exe enter the following command at the DOS prompt

xcopy32 C:\*.* D: /h /i /c /k /e /r /y

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Ghost is the best utility I have used for this purpose.

Hope this helps.

 

[gunthnp]

drive image if is the one put out by pq that does it all

 

[Pritch5000]

hey.

Citrix Engineer, I have used Ghost for duplicating disks across many PCs on a network. Does it work for two disks in a single PC.

Brianc2k, if you use xcopy to copy the disk, you will then have to transfer the system files also, using sys. Also your 'hickery' line does not include v for verify.

I would use Partition Magic also. Boot off a floppy, run integrity checks and stuff. I would be a bit concerned about data and registry integrity and I would run RegClean also consider using the rest of my disk.
pritch

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Pritch

The simple answer is yes!

But if the PC is not on a network, you'll have to image one disk to the other. That is one of ghost's 2 main criteria;

1. The image must be created somewhere other than the disk/partition you are imaging
2. The software will only run in real-mode DOS

Using Partition Magic to create a further partition, in this situation would enable Zelandakh to ghost the image of one partition to the other.

Hope this helps

 

[cambo2k]

I have used ghost to do this, and you have an option to image one partition to another. Within ghost you can also resize the new partition (drive copying data to). Can work with both drives in the same machine, boot disk to W9x OS and then run ghost from the floppy, or using a network boot disk and shoot the info across the network.
I make image files on the network and then pull them down onto new machines, saves the original disk and you can test it on different size partitions.

 

[Zelandakh]

I used my Partition Magic 4 bootable floppy which has a very easy GUI. I was in a rut as my copy of PQDC wouldn't let me take a 2000MB partition and copy it to another drive as the old disk was bigger than the new one.

The xcopy32 with its parameters was the one I wanted had I not got Magic to run - I was on the clock as the Payroll system was on that hard disk (not backed up of course) and the drive was reporting faults everywhere.

In the end, it came down to me being selfish and wanting the payroll system back up as soon as poss... call me mercenary.