Need drive imaging software

I have a 320gb SATA drive and I want to image it to a 160gb SATA drive. The drive has only about 30gb of data on it. Ghost errors out right at the start with a message like "internal inconsistencies have been encountered, contact Symantec Support at blah blah dot com". Both drives have passed thorough diagnostics. I think the Ghost error is due to copying from a big drive to a small drive. I need some >free< imaging software to get this 320gb copied to the 160gb....
THANKS!

 

have ye ran chkdsk /r on both drives?

Also, if I understand, the 320 is going onto the 160?

 

dlb, most drive manufacturers have utilities you can download free to image one drive to another. I've used such Maxtor utilities and also WD. I'm sure Seagate has something similar as well as Hitachi and the other major HD companies.

I used the WD software as backup software on one machine for quite a few months to image bootable backups to another drive until I was ready to purchase Acronis True Image. I always tested the backups I created with the free WD software to insure I had a good backup and I think I only had a problem once. I immediately ran a second backup with the same source and destination drives and everything was fine the next time around.

Acronis, of course, allows both bootable backups and compressed images with full, incremental and differential backups, as I imagine you know and can be set up to do scheduled automatic backups and has many other good features. You won't get all those options with the free manufacturer's software, but you should be able to either do just a plain copy of all files from one drive to another or create a complete bootable drive image on the second drive. You should download the software from the manufacturer of the destination drive you plan to create the bootable image on, if that's what you need.

Usually they include a CD-ROM in the box with a new drive (unless you buy it OEM), but you should be able to download the software from the manufacturer's website. What I'm not sure about is if these somewhat limited imaging programs will allow you to image from a larger drive to a smaller one. Download and give it a try if you're interested and have the time. Should take less than an hour, maybe even less than a 1/2 hour, given they're SATA drives.

 

Let me try to explain what's happened here: this PC had 2 x 160gb SATA drives striped so the PC saw a single 320gb drive. One of the striped drives had become corrupt and we thought it was on it's way to failing, so I used Ghost to copy the striped drives to a 320gb drive to save all the programs and data and so forth. I then deleted the RAID array, and reformatted each 160gb drive seperately, and ran diagnostics on both drives. All is good; I guess that the problem was a deep Windows or NTFS problem that we couldn't fix. Maybe this is why I can't copy the 320gb drive back to one of the 160gb drives. Maybe the corruption copied over, and that's what is bringing Ghost down. So I was thinking maybe a different drive copying app would do the job. I didn't even think of using one from Seagate or WD.... duh! I'll look into that and see what happens.
Thanks.

 

Sounds like a problem with the RAID array (either the RAID controller or the RAID software) rather than an OS problem I would think. Can you actually open any files that you were able to copy to the 320 GB drive? If they're corrupt as a result of faulty RAID operations (whether hardware or software in origin) I would think they'd be badly scrambled and you wouldn't even be able to access the data; or at least that it would appear to be fragmentary gibberish. On the other hand if you can view/open the data copied to the 320 GB drive it would seem rather strange, given you copied them once, that you can't copy them again.

I take it you hadn't backed up your data from the RAID drives in any fashion? You have to take into account that in a striped 2 drive RAID array the likelihood of a drive failure is, on average, twice as great as with a single drive, which means, all other factors being equal (the quality of the hard drive(s) in the system, the stability of the OS and a dependable power supply, including a UPS and so on) the need for some sort of backup system is even greater for a striped array than when relying on a single hard drive.

And while the probability of a drive failure is twice as great in a 2 drive array, the probability of the RAID array failing is greater still, since not only will a failure of one drive bring the entire array down (and leave your data unrecoverable, unless you have a backup), a failure of the RAID controller hardware or the RAID software will also crash the array or cause it to write unreliable data so those are still additional factors in the probability of failure calculation of a striped array.)

If one drive crashes or the RAID software or hardware fails in a striped array, I think the possibility of recovering any data is almost nil.

How did you copy the data from the two 160 GB drives to the one larger drive? Did you recreate the RAID array first and then use Ghost to image the array to the single larger drive? If you didn't recreate the array first, I don't see how copying the data from the two formerly striped drives separately could possible work. But hey, my knowledge about striped RAID arrays (or RAID configurations of any kind) is entirely derived from magazine and website articles explaining them. I've never actually yet configured and used a striped RAID array, so maybe I'm missing something here.

As I understand it, in a striped RAID array, in order to speed up disk access, files are typically split between the 2 drives in the array. Part of a file being saved to the array gets written to the first drive and then the next part gets written to the second drive and then back to the first and so on. This is what makes the increase in speed possible. On the average, about the time you'd be experiencing some slow down due to the write demands beginning to exceed the capabilities of one drive, the array switches to the other drive and resumes writing where it left off on the first drive and then, as that drive is about to start bogging down, switches back to the first again and so on. While this reduces the drag on the system that hard drives often contribute to, it also means that files are stored as fragments. The OS sees the fragments as whole files because it accesses the RAID array through the RAID hardware and software and "sees" the drives in the array as if they were a single drive.

So if one drive fails or the RAID array itself doesn't work correctly (whether because of faulty software or hardware) your files are likely not going to be retrievable. At least that's what I've always heard. I guess it's possible that in the case of very small files the RAID software allows them to be stored on one drive only (anyone know how striped arrays handle really small files for certain?), but any file beyond a certain small minimum size is only going to be a file fragment on a single striped drive, not a complete file. That really makes me wonder if, in fact, you were really able to image the drives the first time with Ghost. Or did Ghost maybe start running, create a drive partition but then quit without actually copying any data over? Do you have a Ghost log that you could look at to see what Ghost actually did that first time and whether or not it logged any problems or errors?

You wrote in your first post in this thread, "Ghost errors out right at the start with a message like 'internal inconsistencies have been encountered'..." I'm afraid those internal inconsistencies are the result of your RAID array failing for whatever cause and have nothing to do with Ghost. So I don't think any other imaging software is going to work either. The files are incomplete, in effect, corrupt, unless you did actually recreate the array first before attempting to create the image on the larger drive.

Hope I'm wrong, dbl, and that you are able to put things to rights with some different imaging software but I don't think that's going to be true. Before you attempt to set up another striped array with this equipment I think you should do some more testing of your two drives, but then, assuming they really are OK, you should see if you can find some good software to stress test your array hardware and software as I suspect that may be the source of your problems. I believe the OS just passes and accepts data from the RAID array in the same manner it does for an actual single physical drive, which is why the OS "sees" the two actual drives as one virtual hard drive. The RAID array hardware and software is responsible for all the RAID magic and "heavy lifting" and that's likely where the failure occurred.

 

Absolutely! I can boot to it. I can plug it in to the 2nd SATA port (SATA1), boot from one of the 160gb drives that now has a clean XP install on it, and I can read the 320gb on SATA1 no problem. When I boot to it, everything runs more or less OK. There are some problems (minor ones) due to either the corruption I spoke of, or it may be damaged cause by some malware that was removed. The problems are minor like IE surfs just fine, but when you exit, it throws up an error; Windows Update doesn't work, the updates won't download, it says 'failed' on all of 'em... all malware type problems. We didn't know which of the 2 original 160gb drives may have been failing (they were striped together) and that's what started this whole thing. I tried the WD drive copy utility, and it reported one of the Seagate (both 160gb drives are Seagate, the 320gb is WD) as a 160gb drive with TWO 980GB partitions, and then errored out as soon as I tried anything besides looking at the list of detected drives. This is the 160gb drive that was originally in the 2nd position on SATA1; the other 160gb was in the first position on SATA0. SO right now I'm running ANOTHER different newer Seagate diagnostic on the drive that came up as 2 980gb partitions....I suppose I'll wait and see I guess.... I still think that one of the 2 Seagate 160gb drives is indeed dying or has become totally unstable....

 

Does the drive in question have SMART features and do you have any software (maybe the Seagate diagnostic package) that can read the SMART data from the drive? SMART, though I'm sure it isn't 100% reliable, is supposed to be able to predict drive failure in advance.

 

Yes, all drives are SMART capable, and SMART hasn't raised any flags. Now that I think back on it, when the 2 original 160gb drives were in their original striped setup, right after the motherboard POST you'd get the RAID array status screen as you would with most motherboards running a RAID setup. I remember that it showed the status for 3 'different' drives: the first drive was the striped array at 320gb reading healthy; the 2nd drive was the drive on SATA0 that read normal (or something in green letters that meant it was OK, I don't remember the exact term); and the 3rd drive listed was the drive on SATA1, and I remember there was red lettering saying something like 'Error Occured'. That was what caused us to immediately move the data to the single 320gb Western Digital drive and to get the RAID split up. Now all I want to do is copy the data back to one of the 160gb drives. There's less than 35gb of data, and this shouldn't be as hard as it is. I've done similar projects MANY times without this kind of hassle. Part of the problem is that this is a Dell, and from what I can tell, the striped RAID was set up at the factory and therefore we have the Dell diagnostic and recovery partitons to deal with, in addition to the Windows partition... big league PITA...

 

dlb, were you able to finally copy the data from this failing drive? Did you try using xcopy? Xcopy isn't imaging software, but it very versatile and useful for copying lots of files as it has lots of optional switches:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491035.aspx