Just wondering some info on hd ghosting

Hi,
I was just wondering if i can get some information on hd ghosting. Like i know you baseically copy your entire hd to another one which you can use as a backup should the regular setup go. But i was wondering if when the system is ghosted like that and if i ever need to boot from the other one, can i salvage data from the bad harddrive, reformat it, then switch my regular harddrive back to a master and use it like a regular startup? If someone can give me a brief rundown on the process it would be greatly appreciated. Because im thinking of doing that so i dont have to spend hours setting up my system again after somehow the operateing system becomeing damaged beyond repair.
thanks
-the new tech guy

 

I believe you are referring to making a 'clone' of a hard drive, as opposed to an image. Here are Acronis' FAQs, which should have the answers you are looking for. Get Acronis here.

 

Yeah like a clone my current system just the way it is, operateing system, files, folders, everything on it onto an old harddrive this way, should i lose the os and cant come repair it, i can boot from that drive by putting it as a master and the other a slave, get into windows, salvage data from the slave drive, then reformat the normal hd and restore the data from the backup to the normal one and be able to boot from it and have everything back to the way it was before the system went.
-the new tech guy

 

Do you think that this would be the same thing cause i dont want to have to boot a special program to restore the hd. I just want an exact mirror that i can just plug in and boot from as if nothing ever happened to the comptuer in the first place.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/DriveWizard_d799.html

 

Acronis TrueImage (the link in my earlier post) clones drives also.

 

Ok this looks good. I was wondering if there was a freebee that did this as well because I Dont want to have to redo the image every 15 days because the trial is up. The hd that will be the copy will not be hooked up to the system though. I will only use it for backup and possibly restore should i need to. Or maybe i can just hook up the hd, then just format it, then just do a copy paste of everything on that hd to the second one and do that?
-the new tech guy

 

I don't believe that you can copy/paste the files and get it to boot. Something to do with the boot sector and stuff you can't get to in Windows, I think. I looked around and couldn't find anything like TrueImage or Ghost for free. If you purchased a hard drive, it should have been accompanied by a utilities disc. On Maxtor's and WD's discs, there is a drive cloning utility that should do the trick, though.

 

Well i have the seagate hd utities disk and it has bounceback express. Im not sure if that will let me do a bootable clone or not because the computer says that there are more features in the professional edition which the list includes a bootable clone and thats what i want to make. This way should the system fail, i can just pop in the other hd to recover and reformat the one with the bad setup, then be able to restore the data to the regular one and plug that one in then be back on my way.
-the new tech guy

 

I use norton ghost 2003 and have several ghost images on a partitioned 120 gig ide drive.Also have a 10 gig slave as a clone backup which I can boot into through bios
.
Besides backing up to ghost images I also format the slave(G) every now and then and clone C to it.Usually use images to restore from,which work fine,but have the cloned slave in case of total disk failure.
Haven't had to clone C from G(slave) as yet but it should work no probs.

Set up my friends new you beaut P4, 3.2ghz, 1gig ddr2 ram,200gig sata drive the other week and I can't get ghost nor True Image to work at all.Ghost locks up and TI won't recognise the drive.Apparently the sata drive is the prob and there are workarounds which I'm trying.

 

Well at least i solved my problem. I used a software utility that came with my seagate hd to clone my old drive and it worked fine. I just had the computer running off of that drive with no problems so thanks for the help justplayin.
-the new tech guy

 

Well I ghosted my hd. Is the drive set up as an scsi? You should use that over sata because it has a wider compatibility range. Plus, what format are is the drive that you are trying to back up?
-the new tech guy