Cloning IDE drives

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu Dec 28 07:46:58 2000

At 07:53 AM 12/28/00 -0500, you wrote:
> The subject (I think) is on topic, the hardware to which I'm refering is
>a little too new for us, but I'm gonna ask anyway.
> My fantasy is that I can buy another IDE drive (of somewhat larger
>capacity) and just somehow copy the whole thing on the original down to
>the new one, without having to go thru the backup/restore/re-auth all the
>programs I've got on it.

You can easily purchase Norton Ghost online. Try www.symantec.com.
It's actually a DOS-based program, although it requires Windows to
create the DOS boot disks. (Go figure.)

The Windows program lets you select which network card drivers
will be placed on the boot floppy. This allows it to clone
drives in a master-slave mode between two computers. Yes,
one license of Ghost lets you run it on two when you're
cloning this way.

I think it's using a DOS clone of some kind on the boot floppies
it makes, and the network mode isn't required, so you can copy
between two drives in a system.

Copying a disk image from one drive to another is one thing,
doing a smart copy (considering the actual filesystem and files)
is another. I think you want the latter. (Linux 'dd' will
easily do the former.)

I think it's on-topic, too - after all, it'll happily copy
older FAT partitions as well as today's latest.

- John
Received on Thu Dec 28 2000 - 07:46:58 GMT