COPYING BCM HARD DRIVE 1

[jmilla]

Has anyone ever copied a hard drive on a bcm? First of all can it be done? I am wanting to have a good hard drive backup in case one fails in service.

 

[biv343]

Get a copy of ghost, power quest drive image, or anything that can do a bit for bit copy. Done it quite a few times, but never for backup purposes. Typically I'll have the BCM backup to a network share, but I'll keep some hard drives with the proper software on them, swap the hard drive then restore in the event of emergency.

Haven't had to do it much though (knock on wood).

 

[acewarlock]

I use Ghost and I now keep an image of every Rls so I can replace any harddrive that goes bad, I buy my 20Gb harddrives from Giant Computer for about $40. I have had to do about 5 Reimages so far and they all worked.

 

[nsantin]

How do you image the HD? Do you install DriveImage on the NT4.0 os via VNC? Or are you pulling the drive and installing it in another computer as "E:" drive and imaging it?

 

[acewarlock]

I pull the drive and use another computer to do it. it's easier for me that way as I have a lab setup to do this.

 

[acewarlock]

The other computer doesn't have a harddrive, I use ghost setup on a CD and it boots to dos and runs Ghost. Sometime I use a long IDE Drive cable to reach the drive in the BCM so I don't have to take it out of the BCM, it saves a little time.

 

[biv343]

I do just like acewarlock - pop the drive out of the BCM, put it in a PC with Ghost, make an image, then put that image on a CD, network drive, etc. If you need to make a drive, you can use that PC and that image.

The Nortel bit imaging tool does pretty much the same thing (actually, the exact same thing), but you need an unlock code each time you reimage a system. I have one lab system that I got the unlock code for, and I use that to make drives occasionally. That works good if you need an "unitialized" hard drive if doing a 2.5 to 3.0 upgrade when you have to swap the 8.4GB drive for a 20GB drive.

 

[nsantin]

good advice.

How reliable is the factory HD? In your experiece how often do you see drives fail? We have a BCM200 thats about 1.5 years old now.

 

[acewarlock]

I have over 50 BCM's in the feild and I have replaced 4 so far, the oldest is 1999.

 

[jmilla]

Thanks for everyones input. Do you lose any key codes when you replace the drive?

 

[acewarlock]

You don't loose them, but you have to re-enter them.

 

[MagnaRGP]

Where do you get the Bit imaging tool? I've searched high and low on the PIC and elsewhere on nortel's ite and come up empty.

 

[3Sixty]

You need to buy the Bit imaging tool you will find it on the BCM price list. I think it is in the FRU section.

Marshall

http://www.marshallshouse.co.uk