In said:
I have been appreciative of the help on here. This newsgroup seems to
be much more helpful than most. I guess we're all on the same level
as far as building our own systems and not relying on commercial
computers that come with the latest OS installed and have lots of
drive space. I have always built my own computers, and I have always
been behind the rest of the world as far as computer power and the OS
I use. However, in the early 1990s I had gotten my hands on some
medical industry throw-aways and had one of the first 486 computers
with one gig of hard drive space and a large amount of ram. All of
that to run Windows 3.1. These days one gig is nothing, and (thank
God) the drives are not the size of a large brick (like those old
ones), and there seems to be no limit to the amount of ram.
I still have not found the software to make this transfer. I
downloaded Casper (demo). Found it would not run on Win98, requires
win2K or higher. I looked at Norton Ghost. They have a demo, but it
needs some other software and I left their site at that point. I
downloaded another demo that refuses to install without giving them
personal info, and I found that faking it dont work. I most recently
downloaded the Western Digital Data Lifeguard. It loaded but did
nothing at all. I dont presently have any WD drives. Then it caused
windows to lock up. I deleted it after that. I'll try the other hard
drive companies next.
What gets me, is that MS puts so much useless crap in Windows, yet
they never put anything in it for cloning a drive. Quite irritating
to say the least....
Um ... That's quite deliberate on M$ part.
As far as a backup, I did that first. Every one of my partitions have
a copy on another spare hard drive. I did that before I did anything
else. I already used Partition Magic to change partitions around in
order to give my C: partition the max amount of space.
On that note, Partition Magic contains a thing to "copy a partition".
I used this to copy C: to another drive. I unplugged my C: drive,
replaced it with the copied drive and got an error message to insert
boot floppy in A:. So much for that !!!
Thanks everyone.
George
OK ... Didn't want to go into *all* the hairy details before; but
there's a way to clone a M$ drive in Win-98SE and earlier. Doesn't work
worth shit for Win-XP and above.
Print this and keep it handy during the entire process:
1. Make yourself a bootable floppy "startup" disk, with FDISK, XCOPY,
and FORMAT on it.
A. You can do this by opening a DOS window and typing:
FORMAT A: /S
B. When the format of the floppy completes, type:
COPY C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\FDISK.EXE A:
COPY C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\FORMAT.EXE A:
COPY C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\XCOPY*.* A:
2. Remove the floppy, shut the system down, turn off the power at
the switch in back, and remove *all* hard drives from the system.
3. Install the new drive you want to make a clone of your old one.
Put it in the MASTER or end-position on the cable; and use
"Cable Select" on the drive to determine master or slave.
Look at the printing on the drive for how to use cable-select.
(Usually this is the default, no-jumper selection.)
Connect the power to the drive, also.
You should now have ONE hard drive and nothing else connected to
the ATA interface.
4. Put your new floppy in the floppy drive and boot up the system.
If the system doesn't boot from the floppy, then go into the SETUP
boot-menu (Hit DEL when booting) and enable the floppy as first
drive selected to boot from.
5. A. When you get the A:> prompt from DOS on the floppy, enter:
FDISK
B. Using the menus, find and delete any and all partitions
found on the hard drive.
C. Again, using the menus, create a new DOS partition,
using ALL available space and being sure to make it bootable.
D. Exit FDISK.
6. Reboot.
7. When you again get the A:> prompt from DOS on the floppy, enter:
Format C: /S /U
Wait until the format completes and name your new formatted drive.
8. Turn off your computer at the switch.
9. Move the newly formatted drive from the MASTER (or end) position
on the ATA cable, and put it in the SLAVE position.
10. Remove the floppy disk from its drive.
11. Install your old drive (the one to be copied *from*) in the
MASTER or *end* position on the ATA cable; with it also in
"cable select" configuration.
Again, check the drive itself for how to do this; as it
often is different from drive-to-drive.
12. Boot up Windows on the old drive, only in "Safe Mode".
This is to ensure that as few programs as possible are being used
during the copy process.
Usually this can be done by either hitting the F8 key during
the first part of the bootup process, or holding down the
control key.
13. Ignore prompts saying that your video is configured wrong
and just hit "OK" to continue.
14. Open a DOS window or Command-Prompt.
Again, ignore warnings that this might not be a smart thing
to do in Safe Mode.
15. Enter the following command string *exactly*:
XCOPY C:\ D:\ /E /C /H /K /R
16. When asked if you want to overwrite a certain file,
select 'A' for "All".
You *do* want to overwrite any and all files on the new drive.
17. Once the long copy completes (this may take *hours), repeat
the above command, only adding the /D switch.
XCOPY C:\ D:\ /E /C /H /K /R /D
Only a VERY few files will be copied this second time.
18. *WRITE DOWN* the names of the few files that don't copy.
You'll notice that they all have 8.3 format file-names.
No long names in any of them; though the directories might
be many layers deep.
There shouldn't be more than a dozen or so, if that.
If no copy errors are found, then great.
At least one file won't copy (the swap space).
19. Close down the computer and reboot from the floppy.
MANUALLY copy the files that didn't copy automatically
from drive C: to drive D: in the above steps.
The copy of the swap-space file will take a LONG time.
20. You're done.
You should be able to swap the two drives, MASTER and SLAVE;
and still boot just fine.
21. To do a *good* job, now that the copy is done, defrag both drives;
only do it with each drive being defragged as the MASTER C: drive.
Not really necessary, but ....
I much prefer the Norton Utilities SpeedDisk for this than defrag.
Especially for moving the swap file.
What's ratty-ass annoying, is this won't work for shit on Windows-XP or
later. It *should*; but Micro$hit deliberately killed cloning a drive,
so you can't make copies that way. Actually, if your drive is dying on
XP or Vista, you're pretty much SCREWED. All you can do is install
everything all over again *from scratch*. Barf!
;-{
Oh yeah: The above list is from having done this more than a dozen
times. Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard" makes the whole process much
easier and automated; but it does pretty much the same thing. Only it
won't work unless you have a WD drive in the system to copy to or from.
Picky that way, they are.
, then I go to the backup drive and click PASTE. This works