Cloning a Hard Drive Partition to CD-R [Archive]

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Jason Dunn

03-04-2003, 12:25 AM

Ok, time to tap into the amazing body of knowledge that is YOU, the reader. I'm finally getting set up to use my Shuttle SS51G as my main PC, and I've got a dual-boot XP all nicely set up with all security patches applied. Now I want to take a snapshot of that and image it to a CD-R so I can easily restore later.<br /><br />I used to use a product called CDresQ from Plextor, and it worked quite well, but they only support Plextor drives and not NTFS on Windows XP. :? So what do you use for this purpose? Remember it has to be CD-R driven - I'm not interested in cloning it to another drive.

jbctech

03-04-2003, 12:36 AM

That sounds like the perfect job for Norton Ghost. That's what I've always used...

James

FalinnUK

03-04-2003, 12:36 AM

What u need is norton ghost, can clone to CD, HD even across a network. Very competent little program, you'll need the latest version for XP support.
I have a 3 CD image of a clean install of my XP drive, much easier to re-load it than install XP and drivers and settings etc.

Matt

entropy1980

03-04-2003, 12:38 AM

I use PowerQuest's Driveimage.... less convoluted than Ghost.... been very happy with it...
http://www.powerquest.com/driveimage/didetails.cfm

JLittle2

03-04-2003, 12:44 AM

I just swithed to Acronis TrueImage for the same reasons you mentioned. It is very easy to use. I found them via CNET. You can try the software before you buy it. If you happen to have Norton Ghost they will almost give you the software for free.

Jonathan1

03-04-2003, 12:51 AM

Norton Ghost IS the product you want. It’s remarkably versatile and very small. The exe can easily fit on a floppy.

xiadix

03-04-2003, 12:52 AM

Another vote for Ghost. Ghost can do the same amount of work that Drive Image can do and more. The item that puts it over the top for me is Ghost Explorer. With that, you can into the image you made of the drive and restore just one file. Much nicer than haveing to restore the entire image to get one little file.

KevG

Jason Dunn

03-04-2003, 12:57 AM

Mobile Bob

03-04-2003, 12:58 AM

Drive Image has worked very well for me. It supports most CD-R/RW drives. Symantec products tend to hog system resources, in my experience anyway.

st63z

03-04-2003, 01:00 AM

Try Ghost, it's versatile and supports a wide variety of media, local and networked. I also have DI (like to upgrade both each year) but hardly use it.

I had a bunch of automated boot CDs in various configs, but lately I've just been booting off a HDD partition.

If you can swing it the Ghost corporate edition is very nice, with a central image target host...

DrtyBlvd

03-04-2003, 01:10 AM

Didn't you champion Handy Backup a while ago? Or will that not do what you've asked?

snazzy

03-04-2003, 01:12 AM

hmm.. I'm trying to find out about this too.

I have norton systemworks 2003. So I just use the basic backup and backup to a ghost file? how big is the file? my drive contents are like 20gb.

a cdr big enough? isn't there like a system restore or something?

freitasm

03-04-2003, 01:22 AM

Norton Ghost is the way to go! Not only because it works very well, but it's developed in Auckland, New Zealand :-)

yunez

03-04-2003, 01:24 AM

i used to be a fan of Ghost, but some serious problems cropped up. Dont remember specifically what anymore, but it forced me to move to Driveimage. I think Ghost messed up my images or something. Driveimage requires 2 floppies to boot vs 1 for Ghost, but despite that i still use Driveimage.

brent_anderson

03-04-2003, 01:58 AM

Casper XP works great for cloning drives and making backups. Disk2Disk is the 98/Me version.

I have used both many times to upgrade hard drives, very EASY!!

http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/

Brent

nwarren

03-04-2003, 01:59 AM

Jason - I recently tried Acronis TrueImage and was very impressed - I was upgrading the hard drive in my laptop, and had problems imaging the drive using both Ghost and DriveImage, but Acronis performed the image flawlessly from within Windows - I was staggered!!

I got by using their eval, but am now planning to buy it - I'm interested to see if it can image a Windows 2000 server on the fly!!

troyrogers

03-04-2003, 02:17 AM

You should use DriveImage and clone your disk to another partition on the same disk. Then, burn that image to a CD. DriveImage is more intuitive in my opinion. Ghost takes a little bit of thought before you actually do anything while DriveImage is just click, click, click, done.

Mobile Bob

03-04-2003, 02:34 AM

Jonathon Watkins

03-04-2003, 03:26 AM

Ghost can do the same amount of work that Drive Image can do and more. The item that puts it over the top for me is Ghost Explorer. With that, you can into the image you made of the drive and restore just one file. Much nicer than haveing to restore the entire image to get one little file.

DriveImage has had this facility as well for years. Its called ImageExplorer and works in the same way you discribe. I've pulled many single files out of DriveImage images.

I've used both and I prefer DriveImage. The latest (2002) can create images from within Wndows - just not of the current partition you are booting from.

RickK

03-04-2003, 04:10 AM

I've got a new Sony DRU500A DVD burner drive. I see that Ghost is compatible with it. Has anyone used Ghost or similar programs to backup their hard disk to DVDs?

And thanks Jason for a timely post - I was just starting to research full-system backup options.

mtillett

03-04-2003, 04:49 AM

Another Vote for Drive Image. More intuitive and easier to use to me. I played with Ghost for a while, but I just thought Drive Image was better.

wilkinsjme

03-04-2003, 04:56 AM

I really like Powerquest Drive Image and Acronis True Image. I have seen Ghost 2003 but it's just not as cut and dry as drive image and true image.
An advantage of Drive image is that while it requires 2 boot disks the first disk can be any boot disk you have (you don't have to use the drive image created one) which is handy for network support, certain cd drives, etc. I use a "universal boot disk" I've created as disk one. Then you pop in the second disk which contains the drive image exe and start drive image. Very easy to create and restore images.

True Image requires 4 boot floppies but there is an option to create a boot cd although I have never tried it. Plus it supports firewire and usb2.0 data drives which is the reason I discovered it. At the time Drive image 2001 couldn't do this. I don't think DI 2002 supports this yet but am not sure. I also like true image because you don't have to restart windows for the image to be created. However restoring the c drive requires true image to run from dos which it boots to automatically. It's also very easy to create and restore images.

Both allow you type in any relevant info you want about the image you are creating into a text field . I use this to "document" my image with info about software that I have installed, certain configurations, etc. It's very helpful when restoring an image to make sure you pick the correct one. You can password protect the images and easily split the images into certain size parts which is helpful for buring to cd. Both programs also allow you to browse an image an extract files from it without restoring the whole image.

I have never created an image directly to cd with either of these apps although they both support it. I always write to a hard drive then burn to cd. I also think true image is about $20 cheaper.

orangehat

03-04-2003, 05:41 AM

I use Ghost and DriveImage. I like both of them. If I had to pick just one then Ghost wins (the Corporate version of Ghost, not the personal one).
If I can only pick a personal version then DriveImage wins.

Jason Dunn

03-04-2003, 06:39 AM

Jason Dunn

03-04-2003, 06:41 AM

Jason - I recently tried Acronis TrueImage and was very impressed - I was upgrading the hard drive in my laptop, and had problems imaging the drive using both Ghost and DriveImage, but Acronis performed the image flawlessly from within Windows - I was staggered!!

I'm testing this product out now and it's QUITE impressive - a few minor bugs (mostly UI), but it's very slick. Amazing attention to detail. Very cool! :D

TechJosh

03-04-2003, 07:32 AM

I have used Norton Ghost for a while and have had great success with it.

I havent tried any of the other programs mentioned. I did try a release of Norton Ghost which came with my Plextor CDRW drive called "CDRESQ" but found it to be rather limiting.

I use Win2k and am very interested in the possibility of making a backup from within windows, but there are a few large files that Windows makes that I DONT want to backup... namely pagefile.sys and hiberfill.sys which on my system run up 1.24 gigs of space. Before using Ghost off a boot disk I usually just delete these files but that is not possible to do from Windows. Is there any software out there that will allow me to select files which I dont want to back up which can backup from windows?

tourdewolf

03-04-2003, 08:06 AM

I have been using ghost for years since ver 1 and it does take some thought before hand but I believe it is the most versatile. I keep a copy of the ghost exe (very small) on a partition of all the drives I service, then I can use any boot disk and access the ghost interface or run the switches. As stated before the enterprise edition is the way to go with central server support etc and remote cloning. I just recently aquired a copy of Ghost 2003, same great features with updated hardware support and works from in windows (sort of). Instead of having to use a boot disk ghost reboots xp with its own boot files and runs the backup then reboots back into xp, no more having to look for the boot disk. Also can set up command line switches to perform different task. You probably can't go wrong with either ghost or drive image, one thing I like about symantec is an unconditional 60 day money back guarantee, even on dowloaded software. Hard to go wrong with that. Just my .02
While we are on the subject maybe someone could recommend a good daily backup program with a good scheduler, not a complete image just changed files and settings.

nwarren

03-04-2003, 08:41 AM

Has anyone successfully used Acronis TrueImage to image (and write image files to) an external FireWire drive? If yes, then I may switch to this from Drive Image.

If the Firewire drive is visible from Windows then it will have no problem - I've imaged to a local hard disk and a network drive.

Try it - there's a 15 day eval version available for download on their web site.

Pony99CA

03-04-2003, 08:42 AM

While we are on the subject maybe someone could recommend a good daily backup program with a good scheduler, not a complete image just changed files and settings.
I think Jason just did that with Handy Backup three posts before yours. :-)

Steve

troyrogers

03-04-2003, 09:12 AM

An advantage of Drive image is that while it requires 2 boot disks the first disk can be any boot disk you have (you don't have to use the drive image created one)

Put another way, you actually only need one boot disk for DriveImage (at least the version in DeployCenter 5). When you start your boot disk builder you should select "Standalone Boot Disk." Only requires one floppy.

The Ghost menus do seem to respond faster than DriveImage, but once you get cloning, I haven`t noticed that one has the edge in speed.

SiliconAddict

03-04-2003, 10:45 AM

At work we have been using the Corporate version of Norton Ghost for many years now, backing up Windows 95-XP clients, and it is a great product that has never let us down.

egads

03-04-2003, 02:16 PM

tonyv

03-04-2003, 03:58 PM

I've been using TrueImage for several months. While I wouldn't recommend creating an image directly to DVD (or CD) because the error recovery sucks and you have to restart from scratch if you have a glitch, creating an image to your local hard disk, then copying the image to DVD works fine. I leave the image on my hard disk, too, in case I need a quick restore of a file -- the drive image can be loaded as a 'virtual" drive, for complete random access of your files. Much better than the bad old days of tape backup.

The most amazing feature, of course, is the ability to back up within Windows, without resorting to boot floppies or DriveImage's very scary partition swapping tricks.

I would Highly recommend this product. It is far from perfect, but is light-years ahead of the competition.

st63z

03-04-2003, 04:32 PM

I've been meaning to check out Acronis but never got around to it, and all these testimonials are encouraging. I'd convinced myself that they simply couldn't do the impossible w/o some gotchas, but I dunno... With that feature, can you truly schedule automated imaging a la unattended backups??

Then again virtual partitioning hasn't been that unconvenient in Ghost/DI.

And in terms of straight HDD-to-HDD cloning, mirror rebuilding via, say a Promise FastTrak controller is always faster than the software imaging I've tried. Just an OT FYI...

P.S. What's the cheapest place to buy Ghost CE? 5-user was the smallest IIRC, but I don't want to smooch it off the work place (not even sure it's possible)...

bbarker

03-05-2003, 05:59 AM

Didn't you champion Handy Backup a while ago? Or will that not do what you've asked?

I still use it for daily backups - it's got a great scheduling feature, and works well across a network & FTP, but it can't back up Windows from within Windows or create boot discs for restoring a drive.

Different tools, different jobs. :-)
I really like the free Backup program that comes with Windows. But you have to install it from the Windows CD because Microsoft doesn't really emphasize this program much. I'm using it with Windows XP. I used it last Saturday before reformatting my laptop hard drive and reinstalling Windows.

It does back up Windows from within Windows. It does this through some sort of shadow system. It also can create boot discs for restoring a drive. It does this through the Automated System Recovery Wizard. "The ASR Preparation wizard helps you create a two-part backup of your system: a floppy disk that has your system settings, and other media that contains a backup of your local system partition." Use the Advanced Mode to find this feature.

The program is reasonably fast, you can schedule backups, and you can back up across a network. Sounds like it will do everything you want, for free. I have DriveImage and Ghost, but this is simpler.

Jason Dunn

03-05-2003, 06:48 AM

I would Highly recommend this product. It is far from perfect, but is light-years ahead of the competition.

I've been quite impressed by it too...until I tried to restore a partition that I screwed up on purpose and it told me the trial version wouldn't allow it. 8O I thought it was a "fully functional trial"? I'm emailing them to see what they have to say about this...I like the program quite a bit, but this doesn't impress me.