Cloning a drive with Ghost 2003

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Hey Guys

I know I really ought to know better, but believe it or not, I've never done this in a live environment (aka this is a production machine I'm dealing with here).

So, I'm working on a machine that is part of a domain, has several mapped drives, and relies on existing authenticated shares, and specifically one ACT! database.

The question is, if I run a full clone from one drive to the new drive, will all of the above be preserved exactly as i at the moment - ie, when I finally go on site (I'm doing this remotely), and switch the old and new drives, will the user then sit down to exactly the same machine he left previously, only with a brand new drive ?

Thanks in advance, Guys - if I've blondely missed out any obvious info here, please let me know

 

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Yep.

Ghost disk to disk copies the entire drive as it is.

If you are doing it locally though make sure that you set the right one as the source!

 

Thanks SiGthingy

Secondary question just occurred - the current source drive is FAT32 and I've formatted the target drive as NTFS ( can redo this if required). Will this be an issue ?

I'd far rather the system was NTFS to start with, and have feck all idea why it's currently FAT32 (we didn't do the original install/build of this machine - only the subsequent domain, so had no control over this)

Thanks again

 

Hey Arro - I'm good, thanks, and hope same with you, hun

This is a direct one-off drive swap in a production machine where the user is concerned that his current HDD is about to fail (making noises, apparently). When the image is complete, I will swap master and slave to bring the new drive online with an exactly clone of the current one.

Sound good ?

 

Gav,

If you're re-imaging the entire disk it will not care about what the source disk is formatted as. When you do the image and put the new disk in it will be an NTFS disk. At least it has always been that way when I've done it in the past.

What was the process that you were planning on using?

 

Ooops! The new disk will be FAT32. not NTFS. Same as the source was.

You will have to manually convert the drive to NTFS. I think (from memory) the command is convert c: /ntfs

 

Thanks for responses so far

Cheers, Si - i'm cool with converting FAT32 to NTFS, but what I don't grasp is if I have already formatted the target as NTFS, how this will subsequently be FAT32 after the cloning process ?

Or is the target partition wiped as part of the process ?

My confusion grows :hhhmmm (don't worry - I've logged off the machine long ago - cider time now )

 

the existing ntfs partition will be overwritten by the clone image as part of the process.

 

OK, I'm on to the tertiary questions now ...

Is there a way to check the integrity of the image on the target drive (still remotely at this point) that I can check before I go and make the drive live ?

 

The way that I understand ghost works is that it does a sector by sector copy of the hard disk, it is not concerned with the filesystem that is written at the level above (if that makes sense?).

 

boot the pc with the disk installed as the slave. it should show up exactly the same as the master.

 

Thank you all

 

Hijack.

What you need to do is shut the machine down, put the second disk in, boot from the ghost disc, select the source disk (the original) and then the target disk (the new one).

Ghost will create an exact clone of the disk sector by sector (as Simonthingy pointed out ).

Next (before booting ) you should disconnect the old disk and boot from the new disk.

After booting the OS will probably say you need to restart due to newly installed hardware (it's recognised the new hard disk and has installed the drivers for it).

After the second restart you'll be laughing all the way to the bank (if he pays you that is).

 

Thanks, Nugg. I can't follow quite the process you suggest, as the bulk of this will be done remotely. The plan is:

[Onsite] Install 2nd drive as slave (already done)

[Remote] Create partition (done, but in NTFS, so this will change to FAT32, as per above)
Boot to source disk, run Ghost. Select Clone option and point it to create image on target disk
Allow reboot to commence cloning, then check both drives are same after final reboot.

[Onsite] Swap master and slave, reboot. Check all's in order.

[Remote] Issue invoice, accept payment

 

Well, remotely, things seem OK .... apart from.. the difference in filesize of the 2 volumes now.

OK, on the source (original) disk, the size of used space shows up as 23.2GB (24,926,126,080 bytes), but on the new drive with the cloned image on it, it reads 22.4GB (24,110,497,792 bytes).

Also, the current (original) C: is shared, but the new D: isn't. Obviously, I'll need to share this on site, but will this work OK in terms of others seeing the share the same as before ?

Any ideas on this, folks ? Thanks