FAQ: Hard disk imaging / cloning programs

[Mr David]

GTO, that is exactly what drive imaging is about. If you image your C: drive/partition to your external HDD then at some later time you will be able to restore that image to the same HDD, another partition on the same HDD, or another HDD altogether. The restored image will be a bit for bit clone of the original drive. If you get a wriggle on, restoring an image to a formatted HDD can be done in about half an hour.

(I'm not sure how one might restore an operating system partition imaged from C: drive to a partition marked F: or M: or whatever and expect it to work. Bootit NG can do it but I haven't read up on it yet.)

From reading Stephen's comments in the blog, since Vista is in beta release everything you do with it entails flying by the seat of your pants. If you wipe your existing XP installation and install Vista only to have it become corrupted, you'll be back to a point a long way behind where you began, and you'll probably cry. I know I would.

Make sure you back up your data too, even if it's in a separate partition on the same drive. Stephen warned that in beta release anything Vista touches is potentially at risk. If you want to play with it the advice is to cover your arse big time.

Running Vista in complete isolation seems to be the best way to go. Installing it on a separate system would be ideal, failing that on another HDD in your present system. If I was going to try it I wouldn't put it on another partition on the same HDD as that where XP is running. Do you have a spare HDD to muck around with?

[Paul]

Take the disk out and put another one in. Load Vista on the second disk.
This assumes all your data is on a different disk?

cheers, Paul

[gto-pontiac]

Take the disk out and put another one in. Load Vista on the second disk.
This assumes all your data is on a different disk?

cheers, Paul

I think i do that.
80GB HDD is less than $80.
i was thinking of getting a HDD caddy. but i think i just plug it in and out.
thanks for bouth Paul and Mr David for your comment
and yes i have 3 HDDs one 80Gb for System and Apps, one 80Gb for Mp3s and Photos, and other 200GB one for Videos and recordings of TV shows.

[Stephen]

If you are willing to do the 'fly by the seat' environment....

Backup your ENTIRE XP to your external drive.

Shutdown and DISCONNECT the External drive (Vista 'may' have issues installing if USB HDD's are plugged in)

Boot up with a 'bootdisk' of some form (Win98) into DOS

Load FDisk and delete your partition/s on your hard drive (i am presuming only a single HDD is physically connected to the machine)

Create a new partition that has enough space to copy your XP image back to it. (ie. If your backup is 30Gig create a partition of around 40Gig)(if your drive is a 250 Gig go half and half 125/125, giving yourself room to breathe for both OS's)

Create a second partition on the drive with the remaining space on the HDD. (you should allow at least 20Gig for Vista)

Reboot after exiting FDisk

Boot from the 'bootdisk' again

Code: Select all

Format C: /s

Code: Select all

Format D: /s

Restore your XP backup to the first C: partition.

Run up XP to ensure it boots like it does now.

Install this 'Boot Manager' software into XP http://vistabootpro.org/

Shutdown and restart with your Vista ISO DVD in your DVD drive and startup the install process (make sure you have your 'key' written down ready to type in)

When setup starts go through the steps as prompted and when you are asked to choose what drive to install to you 'should' have the D: (2nd Partition) listed as an acceptable installation destination, and select that partition to install Vista on. (ie. When you are in Vista your system directory and the likes will be D:\Windows, D:\Program Files, D:\Users etc etc) and 'ideally' this should keep away from the XP that you copied back to the C: partition.

Once Vista loads up get online and install http://vistabootpro.org/ this again for Vista.

Now theoritically you 'should' be dual bootable and things should work and upon restarts you can choose to boot XP or Vista. (If you don't get that option use F8 on boot to get to the Boot menu and select it from there)

If the XP install does not appear as an option boot into Vista and run Bootmanager, I have not had to change anything via this software yet, though I understand the way it operationally works, which is it edits the BOOT.INI file on your 'primary partition' where the BOOT loader is installed (Vista has a new boot loader and is theorically the same style as XP/2003 BOOT.INI files though it is a 'different version')

Bootmanger after just having a quick look, should indicate that you have two versions of Windows installed and you can select the 'default' boot OS using this menu (and other stuff) and with any luck that should fix any dual-boot issue.

So now you have dual-boot in theory

I have not or do not know anyone who has this operational (I don't 'know' every tester of Vista ) though theoritcally it should work, even though I say it should work you need to be aware that whilst Vista is running it may kill/break your hard drive (highly unlikely though possible) and you loose everything on that physical disk. Therefore that XP backup you made is imperitive to keep isolated if you need to go back to XP.

[anandasim]

Hi gto and all,

1. When I test a new OS, I like to ensure none of my other hd or partitions are anywhere near in sight. I've had nightmares and bad experiences testing and playing with production Win9x, Windows NT and so on previously. Microsoft kept upgrading NTFS and the different instances of Windows NT created different IDs - whatever they are GUIDs or SIDs or whatever, that my data NTFS kept getting into trouble.

2. If you have the luxury of swapping system HD (either in a tray - eh, you need at least two), think about disconnecting your data HD as well. Otherwise, you can borrow that whip I have for self flagellation.

3. If you go the way of imaging your HD, the imaging software will often try compression and will only store the used area of your HD. So you don't need a same size HD if you don't have one.

4. You can image to DVD - but if you go more than a couple of DVDs, it's asking for trouble as Murphy would have it, usually, your last DVD fails to restore.

5. When you restore from an image, you don't have to format your HD (esp if it is Ghost).

6. You can image one volume (partition) or a whole disk with Ghost.

7. You can restore a volume or a whole disk with Ghost.

8. If you restore a volume using Ghost, Ghost will resize the restored volume to the size that you specify (or you could let it default). You can restore to any relevant partition on the HD. However, once you reboot, you must have on purpose or by luck have a good drive letter assignment and partition sequence. Otherwise Windows XP will get terribly excited and tell you it is not happy. If you manage to get Windows XP running long enough to change the drive letters to what it expects, you're lucky.

9. Ghost and BootItNG are not a recommended combination. Use Image for DOS and Image for Windows with BootItNG.

Now, let me go into the corner an whip myself - I was overcome by impulse to get a HP 640c DVD Burner just now from C&PL. I have had an LG 4163B for a long time and not made many coasters at all. Right now, I've made three coasters and counting. Happy, Happy, Happy.

[Mr David]

8. You can restore to any relevant partition on the HD. However, once you reboot, you must have on purpose or by luck have a good drive letter assignment and partition sequence.

That's gotta be a humungous can of worms...

Windows assigns drive letters like so:

* 1st -> Primary partition of Primary-master
* Next -> Primary partition of Primary-slave
* Next -> Primary partition of Secondary-master
* Next -> Primary partition of Secondary-slave
* Next -> Primary partition on SCSI ID 0
* Next -> Primary partition on SCSI ID 1 (and so on, until all Primary partitions for all SCSI IDs are assigned)
* Next -> All Logical DOS drives of partitions on Primary-master
* Next -> All Logical DOS drives of partitions on Primary-slave
* Next -> All Logical DOS drives of partitions on Secondary-master
* Next -> All Logical DOS drives of partitions on Secondary-slave
* Next -> All Logical DOS drives of partitions on SCSI ID 0
* Next -> All Logical DOS drives of partitions on SCSI ID 1 (and so on, until all drive letters are assigned to all Logical DOS drives on all SCSI IDs).

Planning the outcome would be a bit of job, eh?

[anandasim]

It's not an infinite permutation of possibilities. Certain boundaries are fixed:

1. You will only be concerned with one machine at a time.

2. You will not have so much disk space that you will want to place 20 partitions into one hard disk. (extremes excepted)

3. You will not be that keen as to mount every flavour of Linux, every flavour of Windows, past, present and future onto one machine (extremes excepted)

4. OSes tend to only recognise the volumes that suit them, therefore assigning drive letters to only a few.

5. You could BING it.

[Lo_Pan]

i tend to use dd. even on a windows box i just boot a pxe linux image over the network (or a cd if elsewhere), dd whichever locally connected device/partition to an nfs share or something, and done.

Also use it for iso images, floppy images, etc... versatile tool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

AS - Edited - Means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29

[Mr David]

Earlier this year Terabyte Unlimited released version 2.xx of their imaging tools Image For Windows, Image For DOS and Image For Linux.

There are quite a few changes but the most notable are:

(1) v2 products create and restore *.TBI files, v1 products use *.IMG files. v2 products cannot handle files created by v1 and vice versa. Fortunately the new and the old versions can coexist happily on the one system.

(2) v2 products are capable of performing differential backups (certainly IFW2, not sure about IFD or IFL).

At this point I've only tried out the new IFW. Although the program has clearly undergone a few changes it looks and feels familiar.
============================

To allay my fears of stuffing something up when changing over from one generation of tools to the next I've been doing a bit of reading. Reading on the internet begets surfing and in the process I encountered two articles broadly relevant to this thread and not just Terabyte Unlimited products.

Backup Strategies.

A key point many users fail to grasp is that the operating system is a different animal from your data.

Guide to moving Windows XP default folders from the system partition to a dedicated data partition.

When installing an operating system, it is common to leave the hard disk as a single partition [C:]. Splitting the hard disk into two partitions, [C: and D:] is good strategy. It gives you the opportunity to separate user data from the operating system and program files. This simplifies backing up user data as well as restoring/reinstalling the system without losing user data. An extension of this strategy is to install a second hard disk and partition it for backups of user data and images of the system partition.

Useful reference material.

[anandasim]

Macrium Reflect Free and Paid editions

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

[anandasim]

http://www.intowindows.com/download-acr ... hdd-users/