Good Hard Drive Copy Method

[ShawnF]

I have a couple computers with NTFS partitions, and I'd like to make duplicate copy drives of the existing drives so that in case of a failure of a hard drive, I can remove the bad one and plop in the new one (minimal downtime). I used to use the Ghost utility many years ago, but the version I have doesn't support NTFS drives. Plus, the version I have is rather vague about which hard drive is which and I've made the mistake of copying the wrong drive before....

I don't want to get a tape drive or other type of backup method for the machines in question because I need maximum uptime. And quite frankly, I think it would be easier to swap in a copied drive than trying to restore by tape that may or may not contain a valid backup (ever have a tape drive back up corrupt data as a hard drive slowly failed?).

The drives in question are EIDE 7200RPM drives with NTFS partitions. No SCSI or RAID. All machines have only one hard drive, though one machine running WinNT 4.0 has a couple partitions on that one hard drive. The other machines are W2k, or 2003 Server.

Or, can I simply pull a hard drive, say the NT 4.0 drive and put it into another computer with 2 hard drives (one with an OS and one is blank) and just do a simple drag and drop of the folders from one hard drive to the blank one? I've never tried a simple copy method on an NTFS drive and am not sure if it results in a bootable drive or not....

Thanks for your help!

Shawn

 

[packdragon]

Basically what you want is fault tolerance... if one drive fails another can pick up the slack. You could add the second hard drive into the computer that needs to be duplicated and create a mirror. This is a RAID 1. If one drive fails you've got a mirror of it on the other drive. You don't need any special hardware.

Here are Microsoft's instructions on how to set this up:
"HOW TO: Set Up Fault-Tolerant Sets on Dynamic Disks in Windows 2000"

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=298155

- Zoe, that's ZOH-EEE, get it right please
- Just a little ol' MCP at Solien Technology
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http://www.solien.com

 

[victorv]

hi,

The fastest method is to get (buy or other!) an almost recent version of Ghost or PartitionMagic, and a dummy NIC and its floppy to boot from DOS. Then install your product on a share, and save your images on another folder in the share. If you disk fails, you have however to open the case, and insert your jolly nic, is a minimum job.
You will have all your images on HD on the server ( you can discard the unused and probably little, on CD).
DHCP use, in this cases is suggested, also only for this service scope.

bye

 

[arlems]

GHOST 2003. USED IT 43 TIMES THIS MORNING WHILE READING POSTS ON TEK-TIPS.