"J. Clarke" wrote in
:

JP wrote:

"J. Clarke" wrote in
:

JP wrote:

I'm looking for a reliable "cloning" program. What I want to do is
simply clone (not image) my C: drive to my D: drive, so that in the
event of a C: drive failure I could just unplug the data cable from
C:, plug it into D:, adjust the BIOS, boot and go with a hard drive
that would be identical to where I last backed up by making the
clone and without doing anything else.
(This is a cable-select configuration.) I had PowerQuest's
DirveImage which had a utility called DriveCopy that did this very
well, but when I installed Service Pack 2 to my Win XP, it no
longer worked. So I bought Norton SystemWorks Premier 2005 which
includes Ghost 9.0. Ghost's Copy Drive feature appears to be
terribly flawed with SP2, yielding error message E7C3000F among
other problems. Symantec's technical support acknowledged that it
is a known issue with no solution (but no word of this
on their Web site). Even worse, they gave me time-consuming
possible solutions which cost me many hours of testing to no avail.
I even used Memtest86. I see a lot of information on imaging on
these boards but very little on simply copying (cloning) one
internal hard drive to another. I looked into Seagate's
DiskWizard, but the folks there correctly state that it's not made
for this and it doesn't quite work right for cloning. Drive
Snapshot apparently does not have this capability. I'm looking for
a program that will do what PowerQuest's DriveCopy did, and after
cloning I need to be able to immediately test the results by
powering down, switching the data cable from C: to D:, boot into
the BIOS then directly into XP with exactly what I had on the old
C:---just like I used to do when I would test DriveCopy's clone.
And I need this program to be known to work with SP2. Any help
would be greatly appreciated.

Why don't you just mirror the drives?


Thanks, John, for your reply. But how do I mirror the drives?

If you are running Linux or any server version of Windows the
capability is native in the operating system. If not then you need a
disk controller that supports that. Many motherboards come with the
capability built in. If yours doesn't then take a look at the Promise,
Highpoint, 3Ware, LSI Logic, and Tekram sites for a wide range of
solutions.


Thanks again John, I'll look into that.