Norton Ghost (Symantec) - Need a way to make 'Disk to Disk' fool proof?

  • Thread starter Thread starter AMG
  • Start date Start date
A

AMG

Hi there,

At the company I work we have been notified by our hard drive
vendorthat certain hard drives are defective and will need to be
replaced as they may fail at some point in the near future. Fortunately
the manufaturer is paying for the replacements. In totoal there are 135
hard drives that we will need to cloned onto the new drives.

My plan to do this is as follows.
Temporarily remove the ide ribbon and power cable from the CD-ROM
then plug into the new drive. Boot the computer from boot disk which
has an autoexec.bat of:
ghost.exe -clone,mode=copy,src=1,dst=2 -sure

Cloning will take about 10 minutes and then I will remove the
defective drive and replace with the newly cloned drive. finally
hook back up the CDROM.

All of the PC's are the same model and have all the same components. Is
there a way I can be assured that this command will ghost the right
direction? Is there a file I could compare on all these computers to
know that Drive 1 is truly in fact the source drive that I want?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. As I do not want to mess up
this deployment. Thanks in advance ... AMG
 
AMG said:
At the company I work we have been notified by our hard drive
vendorthat certain hard drives are defective and will need to be
replaced as they may fail at some point in the near future. Fortunately
the manufaturer is paying for the replacements. In totoal there are 135
hard drives that we will need to cloned onto the new drives.
Click to expand...


Please share the make and model of the drive and the system
vendor.

My plan to do this is as follows. Temporarily remove the ide ribbon
and power cable from the CD-ROM, then plug into the new drive.
Boot the computer from boot disk which has an autoexec.bat of:
ghost.exe -clone,mode=copy,src=1,dst=2 -sure

Cloning will take about 10 minutes and then I will remove the
defective drive and replace with the newly cloned drive. finally
hook back up the CDROM.
Click to expand...

(And only *then* do a restart so that the new OS - presumably
WinXP or a relative - does not see its "parent" on its 1st
boot-up. This bypasses what I believe was Microsoft's
attempt at foiling multiple WinXPs in the same machine -
a technical violation of its EULA.)

What version of Ghost are you using? Are the old HD and
the new HD to be 1st and 2nd in the BIOS's boot sequence,
respectively (the default if old HD is Master and new HD
is Slave)?

*TimDaniels*
 
Thanks for the post Tim. Here is the detail you asked for:

I am using Ghost 7.5. As for the boot sequence question ... the first
would be floppy as I have to boot off the floppy to run ghost. I
hadn't thought of the order after that. Does it matter?

Does SRC= 1 mean the master drive on the primary channel? These drives
are on seperate IDE channels. What would DEST=2 be then?
 
AMG said:
I am using Ghost 7.5. As for the boot sequence question ...
the first would be floppy as I have to boot off the floppy to
run ghost. I hadn't thought of the order after that. Does it
matter?

Does SRC= 1 mean the master drive on the primary channel?
These drives are on seperate IDE channels. What would
DEST=2 be then?
Click to expand...


Hey, I'm learning just like you. I asked the version no. because
my experience has been with PowerQuest's Drive Image 7.2,
which has become Symantec's Ghost 9.0 . The HD boot sequence
matters because it determines what is drive 1 and what is drive 2
(or drives 0 and 1, depending on the numbering scheme).
The usual BIOS default (which is manually resetable) has the HDs
numbered starting with the
Master on IDE channel 0, then the
Slave on IDE channel 0, then the
Master on IDE channel 1, then the
Slave on IDE channel 1, etc.
That will be the boot sequence for the HDs unless someone
manually changes the BIOS settings.

As for your command line, I'm unfamiliar with earlier versions
of Ghost. My PowerQuest Drive Image 7.1 uses Microsoft's
..NET Framework for its user interface, and it lets me not have
to drop into DOS mode, so I've never had to command it in that
way.

When the copy is completed, and if you're dealing with WinXP
(or Win2K or WinNT), don't let the clone boot up for the 1st time
with the original OS visible to it. The clone will recognize its
"parent" and it will set some of its pointers to point to system files
in its "parent". Thereafter, the "parent" OS will have to be present
for the clone to function. In effect, Microsoft will have made a
siamese twin for you rather than let you have two bootable copies
of its OS. But if the clone boots for the 1st time in isolation, it will
become an independent "adult", and it will be OK if it sees its
"parent" on subsequent boot-ups. I make clones frequently as
a backup procedure, and rather than wear out the cable connectors
by disconnecting everything, opening the case, and disconnecting
the "parent", I just have the "parent's" power cable on a DPST
toggle switch and I have the clone HD in a removable tray, and all
goes easily.

*TimDaniels*
 
That was very helpful. I have one further question. Seeing as I will
be doing this on 135 computers I need a way of confirming that what I
beleive to be disk 2 is in fact disk 2. I will be hooking the new hard
drive (before ghosting) into the CDROM connectors. I believe the CDROM
is a Master on IDE Channel 1. How can I confirm the CDROm is in fact
the Master on IDE Channel 1 on all computers without going into the
BIOS. Is there a place within Windows XP that will confirm this for
me? If so I am hoping to use SMS to connect to each computer to
confirm the setting.
Thanks so much for your help... it is very much appreciated!
 
AMG said:
[......] I need a way of confirming that what I beleive to be
disk 2 is in fact disk 2. I will be hooking the new hard drive
(before ghosting) into the CDROM connectors. I believe the
CDROM is a Master on IDE Channel 1. How can I confirm
the CDROm is in fact the Master on IDE Channel 1 on all
computers without going into the BIOS. Is there a place
within Windows XP that will confirm this for me? If so I am
hoping to use SMS to connect to each computer to confirm
the setting.
Click to expand...


Rt-clk My Computer, lft-clk Manage/Disk Management,
and the dialog box will show which HD is "Disk 0", "Disk 1",
etc. You can also get there from
Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/
Computer Management/Disk Management.

Whether that must be taken down to the partition
level for Ghost's DOS command line, I don't know.

*TimDaniels*
 
AMG said:
Hi there,

At the company I work we have been notified by our hard drive
vendorthat certain hard drives are defective and will need to be
replaced as they may fail at some point in the near future.
Click to expand...

If you don't want to give us details perhaps you could see if the recall is
mentioned on the manufacturers web site? If it is please post the link!
 
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