Can I backup my entire hard drive using Sonydru510a ?

[Bluerain]

Hi All,

I currently have 2 hard drives in raid o 40 gigs each. The problem is they are too small for me to backup my dvds that I OWN.

So here's the thing..I want to buy 2 new hard drives 160 gigs each and install them,but i don't know how to save evrything on my current drives. I would hate to have to install everything all over.

So my question to you is..Can I backup everything to a DVD or CD using my Sonydru510a?

Thanks so much : >
Deborah

[jdizzy40]

Unhook your second 40 gig drive that doesn't have your OS on it. Hook up one of your new 160 gig drives. Format and partiton it. Make an image of your 40 gig drive that has the OS on it using a software program like Drive Image or Partition Commander, Ghost onto the new 160 gig drive. Shut down, remove the 40 gig rive and swap it with the 160 (that you just made an image of your primary drive)to master and the other new 160 to slave. Boot up and format, partiton the second 160 drive. Hope thats not too confusing for you.

[Bluerain]

Dizzy, Now I'm dizzy,lol

I don't know which drive has my OS. How can I find out which one has my OS?

Drives are in raid 0

Thanks

DEborah.

ANy links on doing what you suggested?

Thankyou kindly:>

[jdizzy40]

If the drives are in raid it should be the one on the end of the cable, not the middle one. I'm self taught but I'm sure someone will see your post and direct you to a tech site that describes the process. Having your drives in raid complicates matters. Or I might suggest getting an ATA controller card if you have an extra PCI slot, but do you have enough bays to install two more hard drives? Or you could leave things as is and get a couple of external cases and go firewire/USB. Several options to take. Which ever is the best for you. Let me know.

[Skylooker]

But is there something specifically designed for backing up hard drives to a DVD-R? Would such a backup be bootable? That would be coooool.

[overloaded_ide]

I am not that familair with a raid setup, But I think the two ways raid can work are either 2 copies of the same drive (mirror) or you can break up data onto both drives at the same time, each holding half a file, and that increases the read/write speed. But you have to have both drives all the time since niether drive has the entire file!

I forget which raid 0 is?

Anyway, I don't know enough about the raid to be alot of help, but here's a great place to find out.

http://www.pcabusers.net/forums/

Great forum with friendly helpful people and not so big you get lost in it like some.

[overloaded_ide]

I'm pretty sure you can do it with Ghost, though I do all mine to the other drive.

I think ghost has an option to make the drive images directly onto cds but not sure about DVD R. You can just ghost to another drive to create the image then burn to a DVD for storage. Ghost has commands available for various things I don't use myself. One of them lets you break the image into what ever size you want. Like set it to 650mb if you want to store it on cds later.

Since I am backing up a 60gig and my image is huge I store it on a partion on my slave drive instead of trying to burn to disk. I have it set to fastest I think which does not compress as well. Set to max compresion would give a much smaller image I am sure, but I don't need the space as much as I need the time!

Being in a raid system with drives might not be as easy? Since Ghost is a drive imaging tool, it copies the entire drive and also restores the entire drive. If you are using the raid that splits files onto 2 drives for speed, then I don't think you could Ghost to a 160gig drive. Both her 40gigs would be ghosted as 40gigs and when trying to restore to a 160gig drive the first image would restore fine, but the second would overwrite the first!
At least that's what I think would happen!

That's why I don't use raid, though alot of people I know like it.
One way you have 2 40gig drives with the same data and basically you just have a 40gig drive for use. If one drive fails no problem since the other drive is exactly the same! You only need one of them, the other is just a copy of the first for safety!
The other way your 2 40gigs are combined as an 80gig and the data is writen across the two drives faster than it would be to just one drive. BUT if either drive goes bad then you lose the data on both drives since neither has the whole file itself.

Then there are other raids also. But 0 is one of those 2 I mentioned, I just don't remember which?

[BobK]

> I don't know which drive has my OS. How can I find out which one has my OS?

One simple method would be to disconnect one of you HDs. If the computer doesn't boot then that's the one with your OS on it.

> So here's the thing..I want to buy 2 new hard drives 160 gigs each

Do you really need 320 gigs of HD space? If not, I'd keep a 50 gig with the OS and just buy 1-160 gig.

Norton Ghost is crap (in my opinion)- especially if you're using Windows XP. I found Acronis True Image about 3 months ago it works great to back up an entire HD. The backup isn't bootable, but it will also create a bootable disk that you can use to restore an image.

I've used it about 12 times since I got it to restore my HD to an earlier configuration. It's better than XPs System Restore. And the price has dropped about $10 since I bought it.
http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/

[andkiich]

With a RAID 0(stripped), the data is split evenly between the 2 drives, so removing either drive will not allow the machine to boot, and one drive will only have half the OS data. RAID 1 is the mirrored(2 exact images on each drive)

I know that some of the burning software like Nero, and Easy CD Creator allow for a full disk backup to CD's. The easiest option would probably be to use Ghost and make a machine image, then restore that to the newly installed 160GB array.

[handyguy]

naw skip ezcd its not compatible with XP (you can get a new version that is, but Xp already uses ezcd. )

what computer is this & what operating system? how do you know your bios can support a 160 gig HD?

[stiltman]

Ghost RAID support



IMO:

Option;
remove drive2 add new drive1 Ghost old drive1 to new drive1
remove old drive1 and new drive1
insert drive2 and new drive2 Ghost old drive2 to new drive2
remove old drive2
insert drive1

make sure they are in the same order as the old drives were in

I would also look at Drive Image Pro for imaging drives, as I think it's a better product

[Bluerain]

I'm so confused now.

They ran out of 160gig so i bought 2 120 gigs.

Anyway...

handyguy,You said..

"what computer is this & what operating system? how do you know your bios can support a 160 gig HD?"

I don't know if my bios can handle the new drives. I was'nt aware the bios had anything to do with it, I'm sorry.


Her's my system config.

System: Running Windows Me
AMD 1.2 266 FSB
GA-7DX
AMD Athlon (k7) Chipset AMD 650 With VIA 686B
512 ram
GTS 2 ultra DDR 64
2 HD 80 Gigs-RAID 0
Sony DRU510A
Audigy 2
Promise fasttrack controller card.My hards drives are both connected to my Pronise caard if that helps.

I'm sorry, but I bought this system about 2 years ago and this is my first time upgrading.

I can't afford to upgrade to XP now.I just bought the sonydru510a ,Audigy 2 and 2 hard drives.

Thanks so much, very much.

Deborah

[z0mbi3]

beware of RAID 0....
if 1 hard drive fails, you'll lose ALL 240GB of data!! no way you will *ever* recover it.....unless you make daily backups

I'm setting up 4x120GB RAID 0+1 that would bring me some sort of better protection against hard drive crashes, but even so....
The best type of RAID with 4 HDs is (in my opinion) RAID 1+0, so that if *any* 2 hard drives fail, you'll still have your data...in my case, if both mirrors die, I'll loose all my data.....
you can check a lot of great info about RAID in http://faq.storagereview.com

have fun !

[RabidDog]

easier than all these suggests is to disconnect one of your optical drives eg dvdr or cdr then put new drive of 120gb in its place, then copy your partition to it using ghost or other software. I only say ghost as i own this and have used it successfully in the past. It might be cheaper to buy more disc rather than another software program. If your system is mirrored (two exact copies) it will still boot with one drive.. it will just tell you that you no longer have mirror capability. the other type of raid is pointless on a two disc system as any disc error loses you all your data.

[Kool_Aid]

You OS should be on the IDE Master channel One, and be no more than about 2 gb's in size............either as a partition, or a small drive by itself. This is the C:\ drive.

Install Windows, all the Windows updates and all the drivers you need for your hardware, and then before installing any software, Ghost it to cd's or a DVD.

If anything goes wrong with the OS it's very easy to Ghost it back, and your up and running again.

Then, install all your software on another drive or partition......like on a D:\ ........so in the event you need to Ghost your OS back to C:\ you don't lose all your software.

I also use 2, 120 gb RAID 0 drives for Video work because of the speed in getting large AVI files on and off the RAID setup. It's much faster than any single IDE drive. However, I would never keep anything on a RAID 0 setup that I could not afford to lose. It's just for the speed advantage that I have a RAID setup at all.

Since you already have your drives set up, it will mean a reformat and reinstall of Windows, but in the end it will be worth it.

Of course, all of this is just my opinion, and you know what they say about those.

[gmatov]

Bluerain,

You say your 40's are on the Promise card, so simply install the new drives to the Primary IDE, and reset your BIOS to boot from IDE 0 or 1, whichever it calls it. Boot from floppy, fdisk and format the new drive, install the programs you want now, not all the trash you probably have on the other drives and never got around to removing.

As far as that goes, every program on the other drives is still runnable, simply make a shortcut to those programs on the desktop, or in the Start folder. Everything on those drives will be accessible, documents, photos, whatever. When you click on a shortcut to one of them, they will run from that disk, not through the new C:\drive.

Personally, I don't believe in "homeowner" RAID. I don't think you get any advantage, re the many posts here on the subject, nor should you chance losing ALL your data should 1 of them die.

Put the second 120 on as slave to the 1st, and you will have 280 gigs, if you are mirrored, and 320 if they are striped. If they're striped, the first thing I would do is move any photos, etc you don't want to lose, maybe copy to BOTH the new drives.

You should probably upgrade to Win98SE, as ME was such a shitty OS, it never even rated an update. Embarrassing to MS. It sucked, bigtime.

George