Hard Drive About To Fail - [Norton Ghost or something ??!?!]

[dibbers]

Chaps, turning on me spare pc that i use for mending stuff...*ahem* it keeps telling me that the massive 20 gig :banana: hard drive in it is about to fail at any minute and i should back up what i need and replace.

Can i use something like Norton ghost or what ever it's called and make a complete back up, plop something bigger in it, something huge like a 30 gig or something and duplicate the entire system with drives and all files and that working like it had never happend, or i'm having a pipe dream?

I've read a bit on them and just wondering do they really work.?!??!

 

[Hejira]

Plug massive 30 Gb Drive in as slave, Get Hirens out use ghost n ghost drive straight to second drive, remove 20 Gb drive swap for 30Gb bobs ya uncle fanny's ya granny!!!!

 

[dibbers]

lollo....mint will try tomorrow then, thanks for that man, never thought of that cd it's an awesome cd that like! cheers will try it!

 

[richyrich]

Great util disk..thanks mate.

 

[dibbers]

ah well after pulling the beast apart i have a huge spare 40 gig free that i was going to do but just realised that it only has 2 ide cables...one for the cd rom x2 speed i think it is (lol) and one for the existing drive...


It's that old i guess it won't even boot from usb.....wonder if i can make an image ??? and then copy it back to drive.

 

[Hejira]

If you have 2 ide channels you can still do this!!

Is it just that the cable only has a single ide connection currently, just get an ide cable with Master n Slave Connections.

If all else fails you can use a Ghost Floppy Disk!!!!! I think I still have an image.

 

[dibbers]

yeah the cable only has one slot for a drive, i could get a cable and with the 2 slots in it and that but i'd have to use an external power source and would the bios then pick up three drives, 2 x HDD and 1 x CDROM.

I've just noticed that i have a RAID card in for the xbox's and that has a IDE slot on it so i take it i could use that and connect the HDD to that, using an external power source for now?

 

[Hejira]

Each IDE Channel should accept 2 Drives a Master n Slave, if you don't have enough power connectors you can get a Y connector (Maplins) to split a power connector into 2.

I'm unsure if your raid card will be recognized by Norton, remember you will be booting from a minimal setup from Hiren's but there's no harm in trying.

 

[dibbers]

just grabbed a copy of norton ghost and was gonna give that a go as your right about the RAID card and that route. so according to ghost it will do it for me and make a copy of the entire disk.....gonna give it a bash now.


can't blieve how easy that was, downloaded Ghost, didn't know how to use it, lol, so then got a copy of Acronis® True Image Home 2010 and that was like 3 clicks, didn't build my hopes up as copying the whole system to another disk and pluggng it in was just a pipe dream, yet it worked! Quality! amazing stuff! now have a new drive in there and it's all working the way it was........