How do I clone a drive?

[A-V-8R]

A few days ago in helping another guy on this forum I made the statement "That my computers are always on, and I have never expericenced a HD failure."

Should have kept my mouth shut.

Fortunately, this compaq computer's bios reads when a failure is upcoming and presents an error message "Hard Disk Drive failure immnent..."

Presently, I can still boot up to Windows, but apparently my days are numbered.

Bought another HD and installed it; the root of my question is:

How can I clone the new drive? I thought xcopy would do it, apparently not. What software should I try?

PS. Never say never....

[ORAC]

Read Mac the Knife's recommendation and link here (http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70639&highlight=xcopy)

[activewaypoint]

:cool: norton ghost is good and easy to use.....

[fobotcso]

I somehow missed the Ghost thread of Orac's link but I would have followed up Cornish Jack's reference to PowerQuest's Partition Magic.

It's good; it works. But it too is like a sharp knife and you must read up what you are doing carefully. The interface is all in Windows and is user-friendly.

Here's what I used it for.

The Sony notebook's 13GB HD was maxed-out with digital video files.

I removed the HD and put it in a caddy on a firewire link to the main PC with spare capacity.

Used Partition Magic (PM) to clone the boot partition of the Sony to part of the second HD of the big PC. The Sony HD was still intact and safe, of course. PM does this by creating the new partition "on the fly" even on a working partition.

Put new 40GB HD in the caddy and usd PM to clone the boot partition from the PC onto the new HDD.

At this point I missed a step. Tell PM to make the new partition "Bootable" or it won't boot when in the new host PC

After correcting my mistake above, took new HD out of caddy and reinserted into Sony laptop.

During boot-up, checked that the Sony BIOS HD settings were set to "Auto".

Sony booted just like it used to so I installed PM on the Sony and completed transfer of the second partition on the old 13GBHD. All this took about 4 hours.

Throughout, the original Sony HD was safe and if it went pear-shaped, I could always put it back. And there's still a copy on the Desktop PC.

Recommended for use on Win2K and ME; probably sound on the other OSs. But I don't like it for copying a working partition to another partition. It gets lost in trying to adjust the registry references from one Drive letter to another.

[Mac the Knife]

Some OSs (Win2000/XP) may check the volume ID (which is AFAIK set by Format and unchanged by Xcopy/Xcopy/Ghost) and complain if this doesn't match what they expect.

Mark Russinovitch's freeware "VolumeID" from http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml allows you to change the volume ids of FAT and NTFS disks under Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Win9x. Useful to Windows NT admin. [You could use a disk sector editor to do the same thing]

"While WinNT/2K and Windows 9x's built-in Label utility lets you change the labels of disk volumes, it does not provide any means for changing volume ids. This utiltity, Volumeid, allows you to change the ids of FAT and NTFS disks (floppies or hard drives) on both Windows NT/2K and Windows 9x."

I don't know, but it is possible that these OSs may get confused if they see two volumes with the same ID on bootup so you may have to juggle things a bit (maybe not).

Don't change the Volume ID if you don't have to.

[Edited to add that for those who don't know, you can see the Volume ID by typing Vol<Enter> at a command/DOS prompt. M$ refers to it as the Volume Serial number and it is in the hex format xxxx-xxxx (eg 3C5A-18D6 for my main drive) - I think that it is statically derived from the date/time when the drive is formatted.]

[Mac the Knife]

Well, this IS interesting! After a bit of Googling, a follow-up for fellow-nerds.

There seem to be FOUR ways of identifying the HDD for the OS.

Volume label - soft coded - read/write - non-unique
VolumeID or format serial number - soft coded - read/(write) - "unique"
Drive Model number - hard coded?(where?) - read only (non-unique)
Drive serial number - hard coded? (where?) - read only (unique?)

First, the volume LABEL - the label is used for rudimentary checking that the volume is the correct/expected one but this is only reliable on closed CD type volumes and isn't a solid security check, just a quick is-it-the-right-one? glance. A volume doesn't HAVE to have a label.

Second, the Volume ID (or format serial number) - this is the 32bit xxxx-xxxx Hex number that you see under the label name when you type VOL <enter> at a command(DOS) window. It can be accessed by a GetVolumeInformation call. All volumes will have a VolumeID and it cannot normally be changed - here is some history.

"The volume [or format] serial number [or Volume ID] was added to the standard format for IBM PC-compatible disks in 1987, when Microsoft and IBM were co-developing OS/2. They wanted the system to operate like the Macintosh, which automatically recognized which diskette (or removable disk cartridge) had been inserted in a drive.

But there was a problem. Up to that point, the only identifying information on an IBM-compatible disk was its volume label -- a name given to the disk by the user. If the user declined to assign names to disks, or gave more than one disk the same name, there was no way to tell them apart. (I scrambled many a disk in those days when I inserted the wrong one at the wrong moment.)

So, the two companies decided to change the disk formats for both MS-DOS and OS/2 to include a four-byte number called the "volume serial number." When a disk was formatted, it would be stamped with this number, which was constructed from the exact date and time the format operation was performed. (The odds of two disks getting the same number were virtually nil on the same machine, and were still small even if users exchanged disks with one another.) When a diskette was reproduced by the operating system's disk copying program (DISKCOPY), the program would make a faithful copy of every byte on the entire disk except for the volume serial number, which would be changed to something different than the one on the original diskette.

This scheme worked well, but it wasn't long before some enterprising software vendors noticed that they could use the volume serial number to enforce a weak form of copy protection. They created programs that simply refused to run if the current disk had a volume serial number that was different from the number of the floppy disk on which the program was shipped -- or the hard disk on which it was first installed. Users who upgraded their systems, or who restored from backups after a disk crashed or was reformatted, found that the software wouldn't work."

FAT32 disks are structured differently from those formatted under earlier file systems, and the VSN is in a different place. NTFS is different too, so old FAT-16 utilities either won't work or will ferk the drive. Some cloning software MAY copy the Volume ID to the target disk, but there doesn't seem be any consistency across the board. AFAIK most don't. If you absolutely MUST have the same volume ID then use a disk sector editor (careful!) or VOLUMEID mentioned previously. Win9x may record the HDD volume ID somewhere, but it isn't in the Registry. But Win9x/XP and installable apps probably use this as part of install-from-CD security schemes.

Thirdly, the drive Model number such as WDC WD300BB-00CCB0 - this is hard-coded somewhere on the drive, probably in the IDE ROM. This is readable and, Win9x records this and it is listed in the Registry under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\enum\SCSI\ key as Manufacturer=WDC WD30 and ProductID=0BB-00CCBO. Not all disks have a ProductID and Win9x probably does not use this as a hard ID code since this seems to be common for all identical models (though XP might).

Fourthly, the drive serial number, again this is hard-coded somewhere on the drive, probably in the IDE ROM. I don't know how standardised this is among drive makers. Win9x does not appear to record this, though XP may well track it as an antipiracy measure.

Lynn McGuire has writen a neat 32bit console app. [diskID32] that will read all these numbers for you. See http://www.codeguru.com/system/DiskId32.shtml.

Example output of diskid32:

Primary Controller - Master drive

Drive Model Number________________: WDC WD300BB-00CCB0
Drive Serial Number_______________: WD-WMA9U1340730
Drive Controller Revision Number__: 22.04A22
Controller Buffer Size on Drive___: 2097152 bytes
Drive Type________________________: Fixed
Physical Geometry: 16383 Cylinders 16 Heads 63 sectors per track

Computer ID_______________________: 195487034

[fobotcso]

Quite a lot of work went into these replies. I wonder if they have been any use to the PPRuNer who asked the question?

[timmcat]

Just to back to the original point, a few months ago, I bought a new hard drive, and wanted to use the original as a slave. Did'nt want to spend any money on software for transferring the data on my old drive to the new faster one. After much searching, found 'HDCopy' A small, no frills freeware utility that did exactly what I wanted. Transferred Windows and absolutly everything else faultlessly to the new drive. Then just swapped master and slave priorities, formatted my old drive, and job done. Try this link..

http://download.com.com/3000-2242-7628511.html?tag=lst-0-9

Hope this helps.

[fobotcso]

Sounds good, timmcat; what version of Windows might that have been? These freewares don't always work forward on the latest versions of Windows.

I wonder if A-V-8R's silence is because he didn't make it before his dying HDD died.:eek:

Or maybe he's just doing the day job...

[timmcat]

Valid point, Fobotsco.. at the time (6 months ago), I was using an old PC running W98SE. Not sure if it is XP compatible. Must stress how good it was though. Such a small program, but with absolutly no frills, and did exactly what it promised with no problems whatsoever (shame all software does not have these virtues). And FREE! Agree, topic starter gone a bit quiet.... are you still out there?.........

[A-V-8R]

Please pardon my manners....and my absence.

I usually take November off to go into the woods....bowhunting, then shotgun.....

In which case I did do that....(Freezer is full now. No need to buy meat for several months. I am going to make some absolutely fabulous sausage!!!) (Plus another set of gloves for my mother!)

All of the posters helped to some degree....

I just wished I could find a patch to emulate the warning that Compaq intalled in this computer...

It took about 1 1/2 hours to clone the drive, which is far less than it would take to reload all of the programs! All I had to do was follow the softare and sit back and sip my tea...

Thanks, all......

Kim

[fobotcso]

Welcome back; you know how to make a guy jealous. :D

Glad it all workied. Just e-mail me a sausage when you have time!;)