Would like to create 2 hard drives that are identical

  • Thread starter Thread starter dos-man
  • Start date Start date
D

dos-man

Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
monitor down from the attic and hook it up. Then I have to format the
C: drive and reinstall everything; all the drivers; all the software.
Yikes.

My computer does have 2 hard drives in it, but they are different
models from different companies that hold different capacities. I'm
thinking it's about time that I bought 2 hard drives that are the
identical. Then when one goes down I can swap the drives and get back
to a reasonable starting point.

The question I have is how is this done? Can it be done without
purchasing special drive-duplication software?

Thanks,
Dos-Man
 
| Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
| endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
| monitor down from the attic and hook it up. Then I have to format the
| C: drive and reinstall everything; all the drivers; all the software.
| Yikes.
|
| My computer does have 2 hard drives in it, but they are different
| models from different companies that hold different capacities. I'm
| thinking it's about time that I bought 2 hard drives that are the
| identical. Then when one goes down I can swap the drives and get back
| to a reasonable starting point.
|
| The question I have is how is this done? Can it be done without
| purchasing special drive-duplication software?

You might do better to use software like Acronis True Image to make a copy
of the drive, once you have it set up the way you like. You can also do
backups so you aren't starting from square one after a crash.
 
| You either have to buy special backup software, or you can buy a PCI RAID
| card and set up a RAID 1 array. This results in all data and programs
being
| simultaneously being written to both drives, resulting in a mirror image
on
| the two drives. Either way, there is no good FREE way to do what you want
| to do.

A raid array will do a good job of protecting you from hardware failure, but
do nothing againts virii or poorly written software.
 
DaveW said:
You either have to buy special backup software, or you can buy a PCI RAID
card and set up a RAID 1 array. This results in all data and programs
being simultaneously being written to both drives, resulting in a mirror
image on the two drives. Either way, there is no good FREE way to do what
you want to do.
Click to expand...

What is this post related to? This does not follow up any other post and you
have not included any text from the original?
 
dos-man said:
Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
monitor down from the attic and hook it up. Then I have to format the
C: drive and reinstall everything; all the drivers; all the software.
Yikes.

My computer does have 2 hard drives in it, but they are different
models from different companies that hold different capacities. I'm
thinking it's about time that I bought 2 hard drives that are the
identical. Then when one goes down I can swap the drives and get back
to a reasonable starting point.

The question I have is how is this done? Can it be done without
purchasing special drive-duplication software?

Thanks,
Dos-Man
Click to expand...


You could set up a RAID1 array which automatically mirrors the drives
(but if you have a software problem on one it will also be on the other
drive).

Or you could use the Seagate drive mirroring utility Disk Wizard (free
from Seagate site) and do periodic mirroring manually.
 
DaveW said:
You either have to buy special backup software, or you can buy a PCI RAID
card and set up a RAID 1 array. This results in all data and programs being
simultaneously being written to both drives, resulting in a mirror image on
the two drives. Either way, there is no good FREE way to do what you want
to do.
Click to expand...

Not exactly correct. Disk Wizard from Seagate is free and will mirror
one drive onto another. It will even compensate for different size drives.
 
Calab said:
| You either have to buy special backup software, or you can buy a PCI RAID
| card and set up a RAID 1 array. This results in all data and programs
being
| simultaneously being written to both drives, resulting in a mirror image
on
| the two drives. Either way, there is no good FREE way to do what you want
| to do.

A raid array will do a good job of protecting you from hardware failure, but
do nothing againts virii or poorly written software.
Click to expand...

Mirroring will propogate virii and bad software to the back-up drive.
 
Well, my win 98 PC has crashed again. When I boot it just keeps
endlessly spinning the floppy drive. Tommorrow I have to bring the
monitor down from the attic and hook it up.  Then I have to format the
C: drive and reinstall everything; all the drivers; all the software.
Yikes.

My computer does have 2 hard drives in it, but they are different
models from different companies that hold different capacities. I'm
thinking it's about time that I bought 2 hard drives that are the
identical.  Then when one goes down I can swap the drives and get back
to a reasonable starting point.

The question I have is how is this done?  Can it be done without
purchasing special drive-duplication software?

Thanks,
Dos-Man
Click to expand...

Question? What do you use the win98 system for? a server?
You may pos consider updating to xp, virus protection and ghost. A HD
system with ghost and scheduling of backups during slow activity times
will do the job.
 
GT said:
What is this post related to? This does not follow up any other
post and you have not included any text from the original?
Click to expand...

I suspect you have a faulty reader that deletes all sigs from your
reading material. DaveW did the basic sin of top-posting, and his
original did quote. However the quote followed his sig, so your
reader deleted it all.

To DaveW:
Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after (or intermixed
with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all
irrelevant material. See the following links:

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>
<http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html>
<http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html>
<http://cfaj.freeshell.org/google/> (taming google)
<http://members.fortunecity.com/nnqweb/> (newusers)
 
CBFalconer said:
I suspect you have a faulty reader that deletes all sigs from your
reading material. DaveW did the basic sin of top-posting, and his
original did quote. However the quote followed his sig, so your
reader deleted it all.
Click to expand...

No - reader is fine - I manually delete everything after a "dash, dash,
space". I have jumped on the anti top-post bandwaggon!
 
Not exactly correct. Disk Wizard from Seagate is free and will mirror
one drive onto another. It will even compensate for different size drives.
Click to expand...



Sorry, it took a long time for me to get back to this thread I
started. I've got a lot of different things going on at once. At any
rate, I downloaded Disk Wizard. With this I can hopefully get two
drives the same and not have to do any more reinstalls anymore. With
each reinstall I do as the years pass I've got more programs and more
drivers to install. It's getting to be a bit much.

Thank you to all of you for your suggestions.

dos-man
 
Sorry, it took a long time for me to get back to this thread I
started. I've got a lot of different things going on at once. At any
rate, I downloaded Disk Wizard. With this I can hopefully get two
drives the same and not have to do any more reinstalls anymore. With
each reinstall I do as the years pass I've got more programs and more
drivers to install. It's getting to be a bit much.

Thank you to all of you for your suggestions.

dos-man
Click to expand...

Well, I tried Disk Wizard. Apparently, Windows 98 is an unsupported
platform. The install failed.
Either that or I downloaded the wrong version or something.

At any rate, I was able to duplicate the hard drive using the win 98
backup utility (which I think someone suggested in this thread but I
can't find it.) It's quite shocking that it actually worked.

My 5 gig C: boot drive containing only the OS was backed up to a file
small enough to fit on a CD. I then put in a 20 gig maxtor as my
secondary D: drive and restored the backup to the D: drive. Then it
was just a matter of seeing if I could boot from the 20 gig drive or
not.

It worked!

If the 20 gigger ever craps out, I can always temporarily go back to
the old drive. I'm all set. I shouldn't have to do a complete system
reinstall for a very long time.

dos-man
 
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