backing up HDD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Christo
  • Start date Start date
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Christo

hey

just would like to know

is it possible to back up the whole content of my 17 GB hdd including
registry, drivers installed, all files and folders programs installed the
lot to several DVD+R disks

then if anything goes wrong i can stick in the DVD disks and they will do a
fresh system restore from the disks

I have norton ghost and have had a emachines a long while back and they used
norton ghost to do their system restore disks, could i create some system
restore with norton ghost 9?
 
Hi,

Depending on if your Ghost is new enough you should be able to do
exactly as you want. I'm using Ghost 9 (newest, I think) and it lets me copy
the entire drive to a blank drive so that if the current drive goes bad I
could simply attach the new one and I'd be back in business. However, I
believe I could back up to DVDs or CD-ROMs as well.
 
Jan Alter said:
Hi,

Depending on if your Ghost is new enough you should be able to do
exactly as you want. I'm using Ghost 9 (newest, I think) and it lets me
copy the entire drive to a blank drive so that if the current drive goes
bad I could simply attach the new one and I'd be back in business.
However, I believe I could back up to DVDs or CD-ROMs as well.

--
Jan Alter
(e-mail address removed)
or
(e-mail address removed)12.pa.us
Click to expand...

Thanks

I am using ghost 9

I have also been wondering about one other realting to this however.

If the drive i am using now was to malfunction or i was to loose some data,
Could i place the DVD media i used to backup the entire drive into the DVD
drive and boot from the DVD drive, thus installing the backup

Would this overwrite the current data on the drive?

like if the drive already had an OS installed and already had files on,
would the ghost backup on the DVD media be bootable and install on a
completely blank hard drive on the system and/or on a hard drive that
already has stuff on it, would it overwrite this stuff or would there be two
copies of stuff on the drive?

Thanks agin

Chris
 
Christo said:
is it possible to back up the whole content of my 17 GB hdd
including registry, drivers installed, all files and folders
programs installed the lot to several DVD+R disks

then if anything goes wrong i can stick in the DVD disks
and they will do a fresh system restore from the disks

I have norton ghost and have had a emachines a long
while back and they used norton ghost to do their system
restore disks, could i create some system restore with
norton ghost 9?
Click to expand...

That has been asked many times in the NGs, and I've
never seen a definitive answer to it - i.e. making a bootable
entire system backup on DVDs or CDs.

But since the cost of hard drives is now down around $1USD
per GB, why not just buy a new hard drive and clone the old drive
to it, that is copy all the contents of the old drive onto the new drive
and forget about the DVDs? Just tell the utility to put the contents
of the old hard drive into a "primary" partition on the new hard drive
and to copy the MBR (Master Boot Record) - both necessary for it
to be bootable. Once this is done, everything - the entire OS and
your data - will be on the new hard drive and you can reformat the
old hard drive and use it as a backup medium or for extra storage.

If you think you might want to use the old OS as a backup OS in
the event the new hard drive crashes, don't reformat the old hard drive.
Just prepare the new OS for booting by booting it for the 1st time in
isolation from the old OS. If the new OS sees the old OS during its
1st boot-up, the new OS will have some pointers set to point back to
the old OS and the new OS will thereafter depend on the continued
presence of the old OS. To prevent that, just disconnect the old hard
drive and put the new hard drive in its place when you boot the new one
for the 1st time. It really doesn't matter which hard drive is Master or
Slave, but it keeps you having to adjust the BIOS' boot sequence if you
jumper the new hard drive to be the same as the jumpering had been
for the old hard drive (presumably Master) and jumper the old hard drive
to be the opposite. Otherwise, if you use Cable Select mode, you can
bypass Master/Slave jumpering altogether and just use the position on
the IDE ribbon cable to determine Master and Slave. After the new hard
drive boots up for the 1st time, subsequent boots can have the new OS
see the old OS without a problem.

When the new hard drive boots up, the new OS will be on the "C:"
drive, and the old hard drive will just be given a name such as
"Local Disk (E:)", and you can drag 'n drop files between the drives.
If you want to boot the old OS, just add an entry in the new OS's boot.ini
file (at C:\boot.ini) which points to it. Assuming the old OS is on the 1st
partition of the old drive, and the old drive is 2nd in the BIOS' boot
sequence, that is in relative position "1" to the start of the boot sequence
(all of which are probable), just use Notepad to add the line:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Old WinXP system" /fastdetect

as the last line to the existing boot.ini file which probably looks
something like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="New WinXP system" /fastdetect


In the above file, the text between the quotes is purely arbitrary,
and you can set it to whatever you think makes sense to you. And
you can set the 'timeout=' value to whatever number of seconds
you want to have to make up your mind about which OS to boot.

Thereafter, when the new hard drive's boot manager activates at
boot time, it will list the two boot.ini file entries, and you can select
which OS boots up - the new WinXP or the old WinXP. *And* you
can still use the old hard drive to save files.

*TimDaniels*
 
That has been asked many times in the NGs, and I've
never seen a definitive answer to it - i.e. making a bootable
entire system backup on DVDs or CDs.
Click to expand...

Not difficult, make a bootable CD or DVD with your choice of
boot image and the imaging app on it then burn the
partition(s) images to it either after they're made or
realtime, -OR- just put the images on it and boot to floppy
to load the restoration app from floppy or a CD/DVD.
Driveimage does this though the newest version gets rid of
DOS support? Newest DI might still include the next-newest
DOS version, I don't remember.

Where to get the bootimage? Tons of places online or if you
feed burning apps like Nero a floppy, it'll create the image
then you can just copy it to wherever so you don't need the
floppy anymore, can just browse to the image file... might
be called bootimg.bin by default.
 
hey

just would like to know

is it possible to back up the whole content of my 17 GB hdd including
registry, drivers installed, all files and folders programs installed the
lot to several DVD+R disks

then if anything goes wrong i can stick in the DVD disks and they will do a
fresh system restore from the disks

I have norton ghost and have had a emachines a long while back and they used
norton ghost to do their system restore disks, could i create some system
restore with norton ghost 9?

--
Click to expand...

Try here,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/cdback.html

HTH :)



--
Free Windows/PC help,
http://www.geocities.com/sheppola/trouble.html
remove obvious to reply
email (e-mail address removed)
Free original songs to download and,"BURN" :O)
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/8/nomessiahsmusic.htm
 
hey

just would like to know

is it possible to back up the whole content of my 17 GB hdd including
registry, drivers installed, all files and folders programs installed the
lot to several DVD+R disks

then if anything goes wrong i can stick in the DVD disks and they will do a
fresh system restore from the disks

I have norton ghost and have had a emachines a long while back and they used
norton ghost to do their system restore disks, could i create some system
restore with norton ghost 9?
Click to expand...
I think Ghost would be an excellent choice. I have it myself and plan
on doing the same thing. the only issue I need to research is that when
you boot from the ghost CD, can you replace it with the DVD in order to
read the backup. That applies to a system that only has 1 dvd reader.
If you have a DVD writer and a separate reader you should be good to go.

good luck
 
kony said:
...make a bootable CD or DVD with your choice of
boot image and the imaging app on it then burn the
partition(s) images to it either after they're made or
realtime, -OR- just put the images on it and boot to floppy
to load the restoration app from floppy or a CD/DVD.
Driveimage does this though the newest version gets rid of
DOS support? Newest DI might still include the next-newest
DOS version, I don't remember.

Where to get the bootimage? Tons of places online or if you
feed burning apps like Nero a floppy, it'll create the image
then you can just copy it to wherever so you don't need the
floppy anymore, can just browse to the image file... might
be called bootimg.bin by default.
Click to expand...

OK, slowly now... what's a "boot image"?

*TimDaniels*
 
kony said:
Not difficult, make a bootable CD or DVD with your choice of
boot image and the imaging app on it then burn the
partition(s) images to it either after they're made or
realtime, -OR- just put the images on it and boot to floppy
to load the restoration app from floppy or a CD/DVD.
Driveimage does this though the newest version gets rid of
DOS support? Newest DI might still include the next-newest
DOS version, I don't remember.

Where to get the bootimage? Tons of places online or if you
feed burning apps like Nero a floppy, it'll create the image
then you can just copy it to wherever so you don't need the
floppy anymore, can just browse to the image file... might
be called bootimg.bin by default.
Click to expand...

woah i have ghost

cant i just create an entire bakup to a DVD-R or a few DVD-R's and then when
i power on my system, have the disks with the backups on in the DVD-reader
drive, wont they start to restore automatically?

and if they do what will happen to the current content of my hdd?
 
kony said:
Not difficult, make a bootable CD or DVD with your choice of
boot image and the imaging app on it then burn the
partition(s) images to it either after they're made or
realtime, -OR- just put the images on it and boot to floppy
to load the restoration app from floppy or a CD/DVD.
Driveimage does this though the newest version gets rid of
DOS support? Newest DI might still include the next-newest
DOS version, I don't remember.

Where to get the bootimage? Tons of places online or if you
feed burning apps like Nero a floppy, it'll create the image
then you can just copy it to wherever so you don't need the
floppy anymore, can just browse to the image file... might
be called bootimg.bin by default.
Click to expand...

sorry just read a bit more on the net

I need to be able to get a ghost 9 boot disk?

this will boot into ghost 9 yes?

i can then from this ghost 9 boot disk choose to restore a backup, if it be
from another drive or from dvd media,

my ghost 9 is copied, i have no way of knowing how to create a ghost 9 boot
disk?
 
OK, slowly now... what's a "boot image"?

*TimDaniels*
Click to expand...


It emulates a drive, pointed to by the disc's boot sector.
For example when you feed Nero a floppy it makes that into a
boot image including the floppy's boot sector then when the
later-burnt disc is booted, it boots to this image as that
drive would, but also the image (floppy in this case) had
the typical CDROM driver so subsequently the CDROM's files
could be read. A Win98 Startup disk will suffice if nothing
else, just choose to make a bootable disc in nero and it
will be semi-automated.
 
woah i have ghost
Click to expand...

Ok, and?
I'm sure many if not all Ghost run in DOS.
cant i just create an entire bakup to a DVD-R or a few DVD-R's and then when
i power on my system, have the disks with the backups on in the DVD-reader
drive, wont they start to restore automatically?
Click to expand...

You can set them up to restore automatically but I don't
recall exactly what the command argument is, see the Ghost
ducumentation. I'd advise against that though, it's too
easy to accidentally leave a disc in the drive or someone
else who doesn't know what they're doing gets ahold of it
and before they know what's happening Ghost has wiped out
the partition.

Instead it's more safe to just boot to dos and enter the
commands yourself or create a batch file but not autoexec.

and if they do what will happen to the current content of my hdd?
Click to expand...

gone
 
sorry just read a bit more on the net

I need to be able to get a ghost 9 boot disk?

this will boot into ghost 9 yes?
Click to expand...

Well if it's a "Ghost Boot Disk" I sure hope so.
i can then from this ghost 9 boot disk choose to restore a backup, if it be
from another drive or from dvd media,
Click to expand...

If the "another drive or from DVD media" is either natively
supported by the BIOS, OR the boot disk loads the needed DOS
driver. In other words, if you can 'see' the files then
you'd have the correct environement.

my ghost 9 is copied, i have no way of knowing how to create a ghost 9 boot
disk?
Click to expand...


I don't know what that means. If you mean you don't have
the manual because you didn't buy it, you might buy it. If
you simply misplaced the manual then download it from
somewhere.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ghost+manual

You might check http://www.bootdisk.com for some boot disks
then just copy the right Ghost files onto it. I can't help
with that, don't remember which files or if they're even
part of the routine install or if still in a compressed
self-extracting image, perhaps a "floppy-maker" executable.
Google should find more info about it,
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ghost+DOS+boot+disk

You might also look into making a network boot disk if you
have a lan at (whatever) location, it's nice to have a
central archive of restoration images to save to or restore
from without having to fool with optical discs at all.
 
If you have a spare 2 gig drive lieing around and want to take the time you
could experiment by installing XP and trying out the Ghost boot disk and
back up to DVD-RW disks (that way you can use them again). A lot of what one
learns is through the fooling around as well as the reading and being
assured that something will work. I suppose it would be better to use
perhaps an 8 gig drive or larger to do this so that you are accumulating
enough data to fill more than 1 DVD-RW to make sure the spanning feature is
working.
 
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