GHOST 2002 and which drive is which?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike Barnard
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Mike Barnard

Hi folks.

I am trying to copy a hard drive that has been set up to a second
identical PC. I'm ready to press the 'OK' button and go for it, but I
suddenly realised that I couldn't be sure which drive was which! I
*could* be copying the blank drive over the good one.

So, how to tell which is which? I have two identical drives. One is
the normal master in a PC and the other has been made slave on the
same cable. The latter is blank, the former set up with an OS.

In GHOST 2002 (running in IBMDOS) I have both drives shown, but
there's no way to identify which is the master and which the slave.
It shows drive 1, number of cylinders, capacity etc, then drive 2 with
IDENTICAL numbers. Because they're identical drives, apart from their
content. I can't see any difference in any columns.

I *assume* that drive 1 would be the master and drive 2 the slave, but
we all know that assumption is the mother of all f**kups, don't we
children!

So, any GHOST users able to tell for sure which way round it'll be?
Sort of an 'ask the audience' question this. I'll take the answer
that gets the most votes!

Thanks.
 
Mike Barnard said:
Hi folks.

I am trying to copy a hard drive that has been set up to a second
identical PC. I'm ready to press the 'OK' button and go for it, but I
suddenly realised that I couldn't be sure which drive was which! I
*could* be copying the blank drive over the good one.
Click to expand...

Disconnect one drive and then start Ghost and take note of what controller,
etc. that comes up.

After this you should know which is which.

Alternately, format the new drive and instead of Ghosting drive to drive,
Ghost your old drive to a file on the new drive. Now you have a good copy of
the drive copy it to the old drive. Now Ghost drive to drive... At worst you
end up with two copies of the new drive with your old drive backup on it.
.... all assuming you have enough room for a copy on the old drive.
 
Mike Barnard said:
Hi folks.

I am trying to copy a hard drive that has been set up to a second
identical PC. I'm ready to press the 'OK' button and go for it, but I
suddenly realised that I couldn't be sure which drive was which! I
*could* be copying the blank drive over the good one.

So, how to tell which is which? I have two identical drives. One is
the normal master in a PC and the other has been made slave on the
same cable. The latter is blank, the former set up with an OS.

In GHOST 2002 (running in IBMDOS) I have both drives shown, but
there's no way to identify which is the master and which the slave.
It shows drive 1, number of cylinders, capacity etc, then drive 2 with
IDENTICAL numbers. Because they're identical drives, apart from their
content. I can't see any difference in any columns.

I *assume* that drive 1 would be the master and drive 2 the slave, but
we all know that assumption is the mother of all f**kups, don't we
children!

So, any GHOST users able to tell for sure which way round it'll be?
Sort of an 'ask the audience' question this. I'll take the answer
that gets the most votes!

Thanks.

--
Regards from Mike Barnard
South Coast, UK.

[To reply by email remove ".trousers" spamtrap from email address]
Click to expand...

cant you not just ghost it to a few CD-R's or a few DVD-R's would probably
be best, hardware permitting of course (DVD -/+ RW)
 
So I found this old thread, 1 of only 2 like it I found. I thought I'd reply, hopefully helping someone in the future.. For me, I've been grappling with this problem for a long time, but I have a solution. (WHY couldn't Symantec have put hard drive name, partition and data details up front??

First, my observations: On the old Intel P4 board I have, onboard Master seems to correlate with disk 1 in Ghost and Slave disk seems to be disk 2. I also have a PCI slot SATA RAID card to run my SATA drives. When I have only 2 SATA drives, Ghost seems to see disk 1 from the controller card as disk 1 in Ghost and disk 2 as 2. If I mix and have one IDE hdd and one SATA hdd, it seems to place the IDE drive as disk 1 in Ghost and the Sata hdd as disk 2. This is only what I observed. It may be wrong and/or Ghost may choose to show them differently on your system, so: my workarounds:

1) I have sometimes used a larger (or smaller) hdd to copy to first. Then use that copy to copy back to the intended target hdd. That way I can be absolutely sure my good data goes to a smaller or larger drive, then that copy goes back to the target hdd.
2) Ive had to use a larger hdd that holds a working Windows partition for that purpose. But instead of a disk to dik clone, I've done a disk to image and selected a folder from the free space on the larger drive to hold the image. Then repeat the process in reverse, pulling the image file off the bigger hard drive and extracting it to the smaller target drive.

That said, The only other thing you can do, if you don't want to go through an intermediate disk is to wipe the target disk clean first. Then go through the motions in Ghost and select the source and destination disks. Stop short of copying...The last screen will show the destination disk and the data size of the various partitions. If you are copying from the partitioned drive with data, you'll see that reflected in the last screen. (most IBM and Dell hdds and others have diagnostic partitions). But if you have mistakenly selected the blank drive as source, that second-to-last confirmation screen should show a zero data size and one partition - you know then you have it wrong. Stop and cancel.
 
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