Backing up a hard disk (including OS and applications)

[Brent212]

I have two computers. I have three hard disks - one for each computer, and a backup drive that I usually use to backup all my documents, videos, mp3's, etc. All three drives have just a single partition.

After reformating the two main drives several times recently, I've grown annoyed at having to reinstall windows and all the programs that I frequently use, as well as having to configure all the options and settings.

Now what I want to do is create a backup of both main drives in their current states, so that next time I need to reformat one of them, I can get it back exactly as it is now. I've been looking around the internet for simple ways to do this, and it seems like I should be able to just create a folder on my backup drive for each main drive, and then copy all the contents from c:\ (on both machines) to the corresponding folder on the backup drive.

Now if one of the drives gets a virus, or quits functioning, or I just feel like it needs a fresh start, I can pop it, along with the backup drive into the other machine, reformat the drive, copy everything from the correct folder on the backup drive to the newly-reformatted drive, and pop it back into the other machine. Will this work? At first I thought there must be other "things", such as the registry or the master boot record or partition information, that occupy a drive besides everything you see when you browse it in something like windows explorer. But I found out that the registry is actually stored in files in the file structure, such as SYSTEM.DAT, among others. Since these are all single partition drives, is there nothing outside of what's stored in the file system that I'd need to back up?

Thanks for any help.

[IAIHMB]

There are programs for this, such as Norton Ghost 9 and Acronis True Image 8. I actually just reformatted and restored a disc image about an hour ago using Norton Ghost 9.

[Brent212]

Yeah, I just don't see why I'd need a program if it is truely as simple as just copying the entire contents of one of the drives. Plus, I don't know about Acronis, but Norton Ghost costs money. One thing I was thinking about when I was looking for a program such as Ghost to do this for me is that I don't have a floppy drive on one of my computers, and so I want a solution that doesn't require a boot or rescue disk creation.

[freestyler]

take a look at the software section of your respective drive manufacturers webpage. the solution to your problem may lie in one of their tools (might have come with the drive if purchased retail ) that does this type of thing and you may be able to boot it from cd

[Brent212]

I'm still wondering if I already found the solution. If what I said works, I wouldn't need any special software to do it.

[JSB]

You will never be able to "copy" all the files you need while your OS is loaded. Also when you "copy" I do not think you will get your Master Boot Record and such...

Norton Ghost will make a compressed backup image with EVERTHING (read:all those hidden thinks a "copy" would miss).

JSB

[Brent212]

But what if I take driveX (from machineX) and my backup drive and put them into machineY (which normally only contains driveY), and boot from driveY (so the OS on driveX won't be running)? I'm pretty sure I'd be able to copy every file from driveX to the backup drive.

However, as you mentioned, the master boot record, could be something I wouldn't get, although I'm not sure if it matters or not. I don't really understand what the MBR is, where it's stored on the drive, or how much it would vary from one single-partition drive to another.

[fritzi93]

Brent, your post prompted me to do something I've been putting off. You're not the first one to have this idea. Anyway...

1) No, just copying ain't gunna make it bootable. Tried it.
2) Not to worry, as already suggested, your drive manufacturer almost certainly offers a utility that can "add a drive as boot device".

I just got done with doing that on my two computers, one to a Maxtor, the other to a WD. Funny, the utilities looked exactly the same except for title and color, worked the same, but would only work with the intended drive. Same guy musta wrote them. Swapped them out to master and they both work like a charm.

[fritzi93]

Forgot to add, if you have XP, you have to take System Restore into consideration. Two choices:

1) Turn off system restore on the original (master) When the setting up and copying are done, restart system restore.

OR

2) Do the necessary with system restore on, then shutdown, swap the drives so the copy is master, don't reconnect the original. Reboot, right click My Computer> System Restore> Turn off system restore on all drives. If you get an error and can't get in, go to Administrative Tools> Computer management, disable system restore there and try again to get in from the My Computer right-click and turn it off. Reboot and turn it back on. Reboot and you should now have a restore point on that hard drive.

Again, the drive manufacturer almost certainly has a web site offering the appropriate utility. Nota Bene: if you want to set up and copy to a recovery partition, best to do it at the same time as the bootable drive. After the partitions are set up and the boot drive is copied, don't let the comp reboot, hit cancel on the utility and go to drive to drive copy. Good luck.

[Brent212]

Okay, so I tried putting the drive from the first computer as a slave in the second computer and zipping the entire drive. It got all the files. Then I unzipped the files to a newly-formatted spare drive I have that I don't use anymore and put it into the first computer by itself (as the primary master). Windows began booting as normal, and everything looked good for about 20 seconds, but then it froze once it got to the "welcome to XP" screen (right before the desktop appears). So that didn't work, although it got further than I expected. I didn't take system restore off on the original drive, as recommended above, so maybe that had something to do with it.

I did get everything working with Norton Ghost. I now have a bootable DVD for one machine, and a pair of bootable CD's for the other (one computer has a dvd burner, the other just a cd burner). Now if I want to re-image one of the drives, I just pop in the dvd or cd and restart. A dos version of Ghost runs from the dvd/cd and allows me to image the drive from the image file stored on the dvd/cd. Nice.

Thanks for everyone's input.

[stiltman]

Add this to the autoexec.bat on the DVD or CD and you wont have to do a thing

GHOST -clone,mode=load,srcDriveletter:imagename.gho,dst=1 ,sze1=F,sze2=F -sure

Dst = Drive = first drive
sze1 = partition size in mb and first partition
.....F = fixed, but you can resize them if you want
-sure = no prompts, just do it

[Brent212]

I'm not certain, but when I looked at the actual contents on the dvd, I think there were just two .gho files, no autoexec.bat. I'm not positive though, and I can't check right now, but that brings up a question I had -

what makes these discs (either the dvdr or the cdr) bootable? If I were to copy the files from the ghost-created dvdr to my hard disk and then insert a blank dvdr and burn the files onto that, would that now be a bootable dvdr? This is similar to the topic of copying all the files from a hard disk to another hard disk.

[stiltman]

when it asked you if you wanted to make the DVD/CD bootable it just read the floppy and made a boot image of it

[Brent212]

I didn't have a floppy, and it never asked me if I wanted to make the disc bootable. I'm using Ghost 2003. Ghost 9.0 (I think that's the newest version) might be different. The manual for 2003 said Ghost will make the disc bootable by default, and I couldn't see any options to set to toggle making the disc bootable, so when I made the backup, I just went through the steps. But it never asked for a boot disk or anything, and I can boot from it, so that's good.