Hi Skippy,
You've got a couple of options here:
First, if you simply want to make an exact copy of a hard drive to a
new one, most new retail-packaged hard drives come with software to
copy your old drive to your new. If you're buying an OEM drive, you
can still download the software from Maxtor
(http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm)
Second, If you want to create a permanent physical backup that can be
used for many systems, you'll need to create an image of the old
drive. The best way to do this is to use a drive imaging tool like
Norton Ghost, Power Quest Drive Image, Acronis True Image, g4u, or one
of countless others
The general process works something like this (there may be slight
differences with each program):
- boot the computer using the imaging tool's boot disk.
- select the drive to be imaged, and the place to store it. Take care
to have the data span multiple cd-sized images, because in all
likelyhood you'll have more data than you can fit on a single cd.
- burn the image to a cd (or more likely a lot of cds) or a dvd.
- boot up the new computer with the imaging software and copy the
image to the new drive.
Obviously this is a pretty general explanation, but whatever imaging
software you choose will have far better documentation that the above.
Imaging Software Links:
Norton Ghost (http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/)
PowerQuest Drive Image (http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/)
Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/)
g4u (http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/)
Finally, here are a couple articles from PC Magazine that might give
you more information:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,7310,00.asp
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1091166,00.asp
Good Luck!
jjb |
Clarification of Answer by
jjb-ga
on
16 Dec 2003 10:54 PST
Hi again, Skippy,
From your clarification request, it sounds like you're trying to
create a fault tollerant system in order to keep your data/programs
available in the event of a crash or hardware failure.
There are a couple of ways to do that, and none of them were covered
in my previous answer.
The first, and probably least expensive is to implement a RAID
(http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html) in order to create
redundancy between the hard drives. RAID-1 will get the job done by
simply mirroring the data to the second drive, but for true redundancy
you'd need a RAID-5 for the data.
Alternatively / additionaly, setting up a high-availability cluster
may just be your best bet. This approach uses several computers with
the same software and data, stuck behind another pair of computers
that monitor all the other machines in the cluster, as well as each
other. (The first link down below 'high-availability' has a pretty
good explanation of how this is done.)
In my own experience, this pretty much implies that you're going to
want to use a flavor of unix, *bsd, or linux, as thats where the best
clustering and networking software is available, but that isn't to say
that you can't pull this off with windows.
In either case, these links will hopefully help out:
RAID Implementation:
http://www.techworthy.com/MagazineArticles/Hardware/Setting-Up-A-RAID-System.htm?Page=3
High-Availability Clustering:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/HighAvailability.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3247
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/technologies/clustering/default.asp
I hope this helps!
jjb
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