ghosting laptop hd

[roy67ss]

Hi guys,

I just got my adapter to put my laptop hard drive into my desktop so that I can create a ghost image of it and then create a second partition on the laptop hd. The laptop has a 6gig hd with only 1 ntfs partition and w2k os. The desktop has w98se and is described in my sig.

This is how I propose to ackomplish this:

1. Install the hd from the laptop into the desktop as a second slave hd.
2. Use Norton ghost to create an image of the laptop hd on a partition of the desktop.
3. Re-partition the laptop hd to have both a ntfs and a fat32 partition.
4. Using ghost, I will re-install the ghosted image to the ntfs partition of the laptop hd.

Questions:

1. Will there be any conflicts with the laptop hd in the desktop because its only partition will be set active as it comes out of the laptop even though it will be set as the slave?

2. When I re-install(ghost back) the original image to a smaller partition (still will be larger than the space presently used) will the w2k OS have any problems recognizing the new second partition?

3. I should be able to use gdisk to repartition the laptop drive. Does anyone see any problems that I might encounter doing this?

4. By making the second partition fat32, will I later be able to backup the 1st partition of the laptop hard drive to the fat32 partition I will be creating?

I am doing this so that I will have a good backup of the laptop as well as creating the second partition on the laptop.

If anyone sees any problems that I will encounter, I would sure appreciate some advice to help me ackomplish this task.

[roy67ss]

Me again,

I was just reviewing the info on Ghost @ radified.com and it occured to me that perhaps I should ghost my image of the laptop hd directly to cd-r's. I have a cdrw in the desktop. Will a restore from the cd-r have problems with the reduced primary partition size that I will be creating?

Thanks, Roy

[Inka]

Another alternative.. use something like Powerquest Partition Magic. That will allow you to resize partitions 'on the fly' so you dont need to ghost it back n forth.

Size wise.. so long as W2K has enough space to operate (page file etc) it will be fine.

Inka

[roy67ss]

What I am proposing is actually quite similar to transferring all of your info when you install new hard drives.

Is a program like Maxblast3 proprietary ? i.e.Will it only work with their hard drives ?

[david eaton]

roy67ss

If you only want to copy the entire drive, then the FREE program XXCOPY may be just what you want. Available HERE Works a treat!

David

[pawprint]

roy67ss , partition magic was mentioned for partitioning software.
Another option is

ranish partitioningsoftware, which is freeware.
You are limited thou using a 6 gig hdd.If you create a 2 gig partition, you could ghost your initial install to this partition, and use the rest of the space for data backups. Then you could easily restore initial install at any time.
If you plan to use ghost, and your laptop has usb ports, an external usb hdd would be another possibility to create and store ghost images. Ghost 2003 Writes images directly to supported USB and FireWire® (IEEE 1394) devices.

perhaps I should ghost my image of the laptop hd directly to cd-r's

You could ghost your install image to cdr's for additional backup. I have never restored from cdr's. I have created them, but always restored images from a hdd .gho image file.
cheers, ~pawprint~

[roy67ss]

pawprint,

Thanks for the reply, I have read through the Ranish partitioning software site and if it is shown that my solution is not workable, I will probably use that and re-partition the laptop hard drive and hopefully not lose any info, which is my biggest concern.

I really don't see any difference in using a usb external hdd as opposed to using the hd adapter in my desktop.

Another reason to do it my way is that Ghost runs in dos which is OK with win98 on the desktop. That is not possible with w2k in a ntfs partition because dos will not recognize a ntfs partition.

[Paul Komski]

Not sure about Ghost but if it is the same as DriveImage it would have no problems with seeing and dealing with NTFS partitions. DI will generally do everthing from within windows but its "rescue diskettes", if needed, run Caldera DOS and will see NTFS OK. If DI is run from a normal boot diskette there will be problems. Any normal DOS diskettes will also have problems with NTFS partitions.

One advantage of using image files rather than copying all the files on a drive or partition, is that the single file which is created (but which can be split for fitting onto CDs) can be compressed and is thus much smaller than the files as a whole. The greater the compression - the longer the operations will take.

A1 for Q1:- There should be no conflicts with the active partition as long as the jumpering is correct, especially since the NTFS partition will not be seen at all by Win98; that does NOT mean that the partitioning utilities themselves will be blind to it.

A2 for Q2:- As long as the image is reinstated then it should function quite normally as before. It is a clone as far as content is concerned. It is only not a clone, in the full sense, if it is reinstated into a smaller or larger partition than the original.

A3 for Q3:- No experience with gdisk. As long as you have a safe backup - then now is the time to experiment with a variety of partitioning utilities.

A4 for Q4:- Making the second partition FAT will allow DOS and Win9X OSes to "see" it when it is attached as a physical drive. The Win9X OSes will also be able to see any NTFS partitions on your laptop as long as it is networked and not slaved. Partition utilities worth their salt should also be able to see it, wherever they are run from.

By all means ghost directly to CDs but in my experience the imaging-burning software doesn't always function all that well. If that is the case, create your image file (in CD-size chunks) on the HDD, and then burn the image as a secondary process with normal burning software.

Restoring from CD or from HDD makes no fundamental difference to the replication of the image. If any problems just copy to HDD and then restore from there. Only possible problem with CDs is errors - so always ensure full verification processes.

As stated at the start, I haven't used Ghost, but the general imaging concepts outlined should be the same as for DI. Your general strategy seems quite sound and there's nothing like getting your feet wet for learning the quirks of any app.

Just those three important things to remember. Backup, backup and backup.

[roy67ss]

Thanks Paul,

That is a lot of what I wanted to hear. I will be using a spare desktop so that if things go wrong it won't be a big deal as far as it goes.
I will create 2 ghost files as added security. One will be a 'partition to image' and the other will be 'disk to image'. That way, I can always restore the laptop to the way it is now if there are problems with restoring to the smaller partition.

[Paul Komski]

Never used Ghost till today but I had a copy of Ghost2002 that came bundled with my last mobo - so I thought I would give it a whirl.

It had no problems in creating an image file of a NTFS partition onto a FAT partition, using Ghost.exe from DOS (via WinME startup diskette).

So it should do all you want it to - though I, personally, won't be giving up Drive Image for Ghost. DI has many more options and IMO a much much nicer GUI that is easier to use.