XP system drive cloning

[wez]

heya, quick one for the PC geeks... ;-)

what's the best software for cloning my XP system drive, so i can upgrade the system HD.... with the least amount of pain.

from a humble mac user who prefers to keep his PC knowledge on a 'need to know' basis :)

cheers, wez

[Damien]

i use ghost

[Howard Jones]

Have you yet had occasion to try a restore from a ghosted drive? If so, did it work correctly?

[Damien]

yes i do it quite a lot. especially on video editing computers.

it always works. i ghost the xp install, then the install with all cards, software,drivers etc. so i have 2 restore points.

i will have a ghosted image of the ful pc with all plugs, helpers etc and a cleaner install with just the core programs and drivers.

more choices if i find a bug in a program/plugin and no longer want to use it.

it just works for me.

[Howard Jones]

Thanks. I have had trouble with restoring from a ghosted XP drive, hence the question.

[JulienG]

A few warnings about ghost, all the versions that are rebadged powerquest drive image (last two or three) are really bad (On the other hand old versions of PQ drive image were actually pretty good), older versions of ghost can be pretty good.

There are some OK tools available for BartPE, or if you can handle it many Linux LiveCD's have similar tools available for free.

[heathen]

Out of interest does the ghosted image go to an external drive or internal (providing there is enough free space). I may have to do this soon.

Thanks
Heath

[Howard Jones]

Standard application would be to have another, preferably identical, drive and do a clone of the main drive to the target drive. This should give you a bit-for-bit identical drive that you could simply swap in and boot off on the event of the failure of the main drive.

There are other levels of functionality available.

[Damien]

i use ghost xp. its a couple of years old and fits on a floppy....

i hace a second drive that is larger than the drive in using. it is partitioned and partition 1 is the clone of my boot drive. part 2 is where i store all of the little helper aps that i may or may not use. i install these after restoring the drive, if i need them.

if my boot drive goes down i copy the backup drive over the broken boot drive. not swap them. is i swap them and the problem is hardware you may loose the backup drive. this takes about 5-10 munutes, reboot and your done.

i have done this over a network, but i have removable drives so i usually put the clone in the second drawer. when in done the clone goes on the shelf (clearly marked).

[wez]

anyone used the seagate DiscWizard software? i use seagate drives exclusively so there's a certain amount of 'brand trust' there.

i just need to upgrade a 5400 rpm boot drive to something faster.

off topic... i went through a brief period of insanity a few years back, running LVD SCSI systems - i had seagate X15 (15,000 rpm!) drives, anyone else ever used them? i remember thinking that they were incredibly beautiful, sexy things, works of art even.

i'm better now.

[Kris]

It amazes me the amount of audio systems that actually rely on firewire. Granted, TV land requires much higher bandwith but SCSI or Fibre Channel is the only stuff we would consider, and the amount of audio set ups that don't use RAID arrays. Redundancy is your friend.

[JulienG]

...TV land requires much higher bandwith...

Not really, uncompressed SD PAL video is under 30MB/sec, almost the same as 48 channels of 192KHz, 24bit audio. Something which even my laptop's hard drive can handle without breaking a sweat, and desktop drives that can do twice that are not uncommon.

but SCSI or Fibre Channel is the only stuff we would consider

Considering the backend of most cheap (which means pretty much everything bar EMC or IBM) Fibre Channel array's is SATA these days, all you're doing is moving the drives externally.
Also firewire's data storage protocol IS SCSI (same with Fibre Channel) so as long as it has a decent controller chip (eg the LaCie cases) you're fine.

snd the amount of audio set ups that don't use RAID arrays. Redundancy is your friend.

Yes, but unless it's genuine hardware raid (ie not adaptec or similar) it can be more trouble then it's worth, and unless it's a really good you have the very real problem of controller failure being more likely.

The nice bit about non-destructive DAW's is that it's normally very hard to modify the underlying audio file, which means that all the editing and mixing work takes place on one small EDL file that you can back up every version of and will still only be a few MB.

Whilst a 10k or even 15k RPM drive is nice for a system drive, it really wouldn't help audio that much, as audio generally doesn't cause lots of seeks, rather you get a lot of long (by drive standards) reads and small seeks to nearby sectors.

[Kris]

good points but I was actually referring to HD. Sorry I didn't make that clear. However, you're talking about 48 channels of simultaneaous audio, the comparisons in video make my point much more valid.