Copy Hard Drives

[maraud]

I am trying to copy my C drive and D drive to a new hard drive called Backup drive K. Drive K will be used only if the C or D drive dies so that I do not loose data and minimize down time.
I have tried to drag C to K in my computer and it won't copy. Does anyone know how to do it?

[ctal]

A running operating system can't copy itself. Also, having two identical c drives in the system at the same time will cause problems. You should use a drive imaging program to create an image file(s) of your c drive, and store that image on your backup drive. The imaging program will provide for a bootable cd or floppy that can restore the image to a replacement c drive (or to the original c drive, if the drive still works but you want to do a restore due to a corruption problem).

Alternatively, you could use some of these programs to create a clone of your c drive, which would be identical to it, but you would want to disconnect it from the system before rebooting into Windows. Imaging is a better approach, in part because you can periodically redo the image, so that it is up to date, without reconnecting and disconnecting drives.

A little searching will lead you to several drive imaging programs, including Acronis True Image, Ghost, Terabyte Unlimited's programs, ShadowProtect, and others. I use Drive Image 2002, which is no longer available. To get started, I suggest looking at this thread:

looking for a new back-up program

Regards,
-- Al

[rjs735]

I used acronis True Image home ver 10. I copied win2k from one drive to the other. Flipfloped them rebooted and was good to go. I also used it to copy a 40gb 4 partition to a 250gb 4 partition XP pro Sp2/win98 se dual boot worked fine. In this case it even new to ask copy proportional due to the size difference.

Also in this case I used an internal drive to copy from and the copy to drive was externally connected usb sata drive. When I got thru I placed the external in the internal slot.

[JBNimble]

I also use True Image to clone hard drives. Never tried/trusted the image approach.

For drives other than C:
the following DOS xcopy command works, even with XP.

For example, to copy partition e: to partition f:
xcopy e: f:/e/c/h/r/k/s/v/d

This will NOT create an exact copy. It will update any files on F: that are older than on E:
and also it will add any new files from E: to F:

It will NOT remove from f: files which are absent on e:

I have two hard drives -- one as a backup of the other. Each has two partitions -- one for OS & applications, the second for my creations.
I use xcopy frequently to backup the second partition (E: on my primary drive & F: on my backup drive).
And I don't want RAID backup, since my approach allows me to choose when to backup.

For W95 & W98 & ME, this command WOULD handle the C: partition, but it does not work on C: with later OS versions.

[rjs735]

I have used the above successfully. Run the program from the run command line. From within the booted OS.

I also have run the very same command with the same options from a dos prompt. You have to have boot disc or now cd with the all the req commands available on the boot disc or cd like format etc if you need them.


I have successfully created a bootable duplicate if memory servers me right from the dos prompt obviously only for win98.

There is also freebie called xxcopy which has more function than the xcopy or xcopy32 commands.

[maraud]

Thanks to all for the great info, Since I have old copies of Power Quest drive copy and partition magic, I will probably purchase Shadow protect.

[ctal]

You're welcome!

As a point of interest, I believe the reason that the command the other posters' mentioned allows copying "c" when running W98, but not when running XP, is as follows: W98 (and 98SE and ME and 95) are dos-based, and essentially Windows runs "within" dos (i.e., on a dos "platform"). XP is not dos-based, and, conversely, the dos-like command prompt that XP provides runs "within" Windows.

Regards,

-- Al