Cloning IDE drives

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Thu Dec 28 08:01:03 2000

> 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.
>
> I have a Pentium I wintel box which I've had for nearly five years.
> It's 1.9 GB HD has been slowly developing bearing whine for the last
> several months. It is getting noticibly louder now and I'm sure this
> faithful old HD is nearing the end of it's earthly sojourn.
>
> 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. I have 8mm streaming tape backups of the system,
> but that's a pain.

Symantec's Ghost can do this. You didn't mention much else about the
system, i.e. running DOS or Windows, FAT16 or FAT32...

If you're running Windows and you've formetted the older drive as
FAT32, then you're in the ideal shape- you can clone your partition
to a new partition on the new drive and in its new form, it can be
as large as the disk.

However, if you're running DOS, and/or have the drive partition(s)
formatted as FAT16, you'll be limited to cloning the old drive's
paritions to partitions on the new drive that must top out at 2GB
(2047MB, actually). Additionally, the BIOS of the motherboard in
this PC may or may not be up-to-date enough to handle the large
sizes of newer IDE drives. A BIOS upgrade might help that. Also,
if you've got multiple FAT16 partitions, I'm not sure how things
will work on the second FAT16 partition if, in cloning, you grow
the first to the 2047MB limit.

I do this all the time, mostly to get around the problem of NT4
not installing on drives larger than just under 8GB.

hth,
-doug q
 
Received on Thu Dec 28 2000 - 08:01:03 GMT