Topic: What's the best way to make an exact copy of hda?

[John]

Looking for the best way to do this..Esp since my sme box is heavily configured.

[Bill]

Not sure if its the "best" way to do it but you can use a tool like Norton Ghost to duplicate your drive. You will end up with an exact copy of the drive.

[Tom Keiser]

If you use Ghost, just make sure to restore to another drive and test it before you decide you are protected. I have seen Ghost *NOT* work more often than it does work. Also, there are many versions of Ghost, and at least two levels of product -- reflected in the price.

If you are using HDA as a boot drive only, then use something like Partition Magic 8 to shrink down the "/" partition to somewhere between 2 and 3 GB. This will make your image-making much faster. Also, if HDA is a boot drive only, the image can easily fit on a CD-Rom.

Good Luck,

Tom

[Michael Smith]

My experience differs from Mr. Keiser's.  I've had excellent success with Norton Ghost 2002 & 2003 duplicating ext2 & ext3 filesystems.  I have had Ghost refuse to cooperate when trying to copy a partition with a bad MFT, and I've had it balk at bad sectors ... but you can override the latter behavior with command-line switches or options within the GUI.

[John]

Thanks was planing of putting the hda dirve in a windows box and use norton to make a copy to dvd

[Tom Keiser]

Michael

Thank you for the courteous wording of your response. My intent, though not well stated, was to say that sometimes a Ghost image, after being restored to another drive, will not boot. So, it is important to test that the final result will work in an emergency.

As I have said on these forums before, I have had good success with a product from Novastor called Instant Recovery -- a linux-based bootable CD that works on "most" boxes. You can get a free 30-day trial download and see if it works on your hardware before paying from:

[URL: http://www.novastor.com

My servers always have secondary drives for data storage, and I put the image of the boot drive onto the "primary" ibay for later retrieval, if needed.

Regards,

Tom

[Tom Haynes]

Try mondoarchive...

I have had great success with this and wrote a brief howto.

http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/thaynes/beta/mondorescue/install.htm

[sam]

I also have had great success with ghost v7.
1.Customize your SME box
2. Do a HD->image file (high compression) in ghost to another spare HD
3. Burn a Bootable CD with a batch file on it making sure your boot and swap partition are the same size when exported (important!! otherwise destination HD won't boot). Use the command:
ghost -clone,mode=load,src=d:\SME55.GHO,dst=1,sze1=F,sze2=F,sze3=V -sure
4. This will fill out the the Linux extended partition to the max size of the destination HD and keep your boot and swap partition the same. Takes about 4mins to dump a whole system. ie Make an exact copy of your machine

sam

[Mika Löf]

What about the dd command? dd if=/dev/hda of=dev/hd{otherdisk}?

[raem]

This HOWTO may answer the Ghosted clone not rebooting problem.

http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/rmitchell/smeserver/howto/Cloning%20drive%20with%20Ghost%20lilo.conf%20fix%20HOWTO%20for%20sme%20server.htm

[mbachmann]

dd works only if HD have same size, afaik.

[duncan]

dd works only if HD have same size, afaik.

If the second drive is larger then there will be no problem.