exact clone of hard drive?

[daywane]

that's what i want to do... My father in law is driving me crazy....
I built him a PC.
He can kill any PC. I am sick of going over there every 3 months and formating his hard drive and then getting the updates (SP1 and SP2)
kills the hole day.
I have 2 - 80 gig hard drives on his PC
Its not the PC. He is 70 + yrs old and gets click happy and don't know what the heck he is doing... Back in the old Atari days he was good but now ...
I would like to redo his hard drive and get SP1, all his drivers

[SpamMe]

I've used Norton Ghost for exactly this kind of thing (but not often enough that I could tell you what went wrong or something).

[quarterback]

Yeah, Ghost is exactly what you want to use for this. 

Did you try to ghost the drive while you were actually using the drive?  Perhaps you only ghosted part of it?  What version of Ghost, the newest versions use a pretty much a step-by-step process I believe so you shouldn't have problems/be confused

[daywane]

I saved a ghost image to drive d
as I expected he had problems a few months later
I open ghost and extrated to c
pc problems still there
not sure what version . He is off on Vacation for the weekend
i will find out Monday
1st time I ever used it maybe I did it wrong

[Thenasty]

If I were you, once you re-install everything (you asid you had 2-80gb) in C, GHOST DRIVE TO DRIVE to D then just connect C and leave D in the case UNPLUG, so when he screws up, all you need to do is waste 1/2 hour installing everything again, better that hours and hours and reboot and reboot etc...
If you leave the D plug in or have an image of C in the system that he can access, he could accidentally delete it.
If you are using 98, then at least you can create a folder with ALT255 and put the image there and when that folder is double click within 98, it won't open, nox XP can open it no problem. This is how I used to hide PRON in my system from the kids so they can't access it unless they know COMMAND PROMP DOS COMMANDS.
I'm sure there is a program out there that let you preotect a FOLDER but i never look into it, maybe someone here could refer one so I could try it. I missed my PRON cause now I always delete it after view 

[Chris]

If he's using XP, make sure you have a recent copy of Ghost.

--Chris

[daywane]

yes XP pro.
I must be honest I got the Ghost from KAZAA .
I looked on ebay and that program is cheep
( I am so ashamed  )

[quarterback]

It really is a good program and worth paying for (IMO).  I've been using it since 1997 and it's always worked for me.  The newer versions are even easier to use than the 1997 version and should be step-by-step.   

I believe it should dump you into DOS to do the full system drive backup (did it? do you remember?)  Trying to back up an entire drive in Windows is tough while there are programs running on that drive (like your Operating System).   So that would be my first guess as to why you had problems.... but I don't know, I wasn't there, so I'm just hypothesizing.

[daywane]

I don't think I went to dos.
It did reboot and Nortons came up on boot up
I will buy the newest version.
1 good thing after using it it did fix most of the problems and makes me want to buy the real thing. maybe the one I got is not new enough for XP or some vital parts of the program are missing.
After the record industry thing I no longer have any P2P

Was a heck of a ride while it lasted.

[wakerlet]

I've also had luck with CasperXP.  It's a nice basic drive cloning program and has saved me endless hours of time.

-Todd

[elvis]

If you just want harddisk to harddisk cloning, G4L (Ghost4Linux) is a neat little program:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/

Totally free (source and cost).  Download it, burn it to a CD.  It uses a frontend to the unix program "dd" (Direct Dump).  It can copy any partition type from one hard disk to another.

It's no good for reading individual files out of backups, but if you just want to make an image of an entire partition or disk, it's great.

[daywane]

I will check it out. thanks

[quarterback]

I don't think I went to dos.
It did reboot and Nortons came up on boot up

Maybe that's how it' supposed to work.  In the old days it was ALL DOS, but I think the newest versions actually boot to the CD-Rom and run off there, heck, I can't remember and I just did my last full drive-backup  like 4 months ago. 

I should just open up Ghost and see what happens... I've got version 9.something and I'm running XP.  When I start up ghost there is an option for "backup drive", you click on that and the wizard takes you through it.  Just make sure you're saving the image on something OTHER than the drive (or partition) that you're backing up and you should be good to go.

[SpamMe]

Oh, yeah, I've always run it in dos from a floppy.

[_Iz-]

I've also ghosted systems to a file (saved on another drive) then made a bootable cd with the image, and the program that I could use to recover the original drive. Basically a homebrew version of the recovery cd that you get with systems from a major manufacturer except customized the way I want it to be.