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Thread: How to back up a hard drive

  1. #1
    Junior Member
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    Dec 2003
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    How to back up a hard drive

    I need to copy my current HD to another HD. I want to copy everything you can think up of (like the boot record) because i plan to run it as master. I read a book called "Enhanced A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC" it said something about disk cloning (or imaging) copies everything like the boot sectors and OS aplications, and it listed some programs that will do it like Norton Ghost, Drive Image (power quest), ImageCast (Innovative Software). I also want to know that are the imaging listed above are the same as Burning Images like ISOs? Oh yeah the book was published in 2000 so its kind of old.
    BTW: i tried Power Quest Partition Magic's copy hard drive feature but i didnt seem to get it to work, so if you could tell me wat i might of missed it would be great.
    Thanks

  2. #2
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    I have done this in the past, and have allways used the installation/tools utility from the new/target HDD manufacturer's site. When you do the install you are usually prompted if you want to copy another drive.

    Just set it up as the master (remember to change the jumpers!!!)

    I am presuming that you do not want to dual boot or anything fancy?

    Good luck

  3. #3
    Antionline Herpetologist
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    If both hard disks are the same size, you can use linux's dd command to copy hard disks. First, setup the old hard disk as primary master and the new one as primary slave. Then, just boot into linux from a knoppix cd and type "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" without the quotes. Sit back, relax and enjoy.
    Cheers,
    cgkanchi
    Buy the Snakes of India book, support research and education (sorry the website has been discontinued)
    My blog: http://biology000.blogspot.com

  4. #4
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    Thanks cgkanchi , I've been wondering about using dd. Why do the disks have to be the same size, other than your partition sizes would be goofy, and your free space would report different. But that could be straightened out. (I'm talking about transferrring to a larger drive, of course).

  5. #5
    Junior Member
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    I couldnt find a tool or utility from Western Digital's site (both are WD) and i do plan to run dual boot. And i dont have linux, or even experienced it. thanks anyways

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