another computer fix story...

A longish one again.

A few days ago the machine starting making the clicking noise that disks make when they are about to go bad. This noise indicates that the moving head spindle stepper motor is having problems engaging for some reason. O/S blocks while waiting for the disk to engage, position, and read. It had been happening every couple of weeks, in particular when the disks had been idle for some hours, for months.

Then all of a sudden it was ever minute, or every few seconds...pending disaster. Worst thing--it was the boot disk doing it, although I didn't know that right away.

So I went looking for a NAS unit that I could configure as RAID 1 (the mirroring approach, for fault tolerance). Figured I'd just start moving all the files that aren't part of booting onto the NAS. Cost of a RAID 1 NAS unit looked like it would be$300-$350, incl a pair of 500GB drives.

Best to get one with hardware RAID, if possible, and that has passworded control over access. Otherwise it's going to be open on my wireless net (well, not completely open, of course, I do have acess control set, and MAC-address limiting, but that stuff is spoofable/crackable).

So I evolved a plan whereby I would start with a 1 TB drive, use that as part of the copying shuffle, and order a RAID NAS. Then I discovered it was the boot drive that was failing.

This is a far harder problem--you can't just drag files around to make a copy of a boot disk. You also need the deep hidden things like the Master Boot Record, and some other low-level stuff that Windows Explorer can't get at. In addition, Windows Explorer can't copy files that are somehow in use (there are several things in your home-dir that are un-copyable that way).

So I used the new 1TB drive as a holder for data needing to be copied. At first I thought I'd just move drive E: content onto the 1 TB disk (ultimately this was right), and then clone C: onto E:.

I had plenty of space to shuffle things around...the real issue, and the centerpiece of this blog, is how do you clone a disk? What I want is to essentially make a new/different disk look exactly like the boot disk, then remove the boot disk and be back to where I was.

Earlier in the year I did it several times on my Mac G5. There's a nice convenient, easy to use tool for OSX that does this one thing: Carbon Copy Cloner. That's what it does. I did several disks this way, because I wanted to migrate from the original 160 GB disks (which were nearly full, because of MP3s and DVR) to 500 GBs, AND I wanted to install Leopard as well. So I figured I'd clone the boot disk, then install Leopard on the boot disk, and if I had to go backwards, that'd be easy. This whole process went just fine. Have had zero trouble with it, the clone was bootable, etc.

Windows is not so simple about this.

Well, ultimately, it kinda is, although not trivial. There appear to be two competing products for this, and some also-rans. And some freebies.

The big two are Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, and Norton Ghost. I also came across Paragon Disk Copy, which appears to be third.

What'd be ideal is if I could take the 1 TB disk, partition in two, with a smaller partition matching the boot disk, and have that regularly re-image the boot disk, and my old drive E: stuff on the bigger partition. That way I'd always have a safe partition I could use as emergency boot.

That doesn't seem to be one of the possibilities.

I downloaded the Paragon demo, but it doesn't actually work. Well, it does, sort of. You can walk through the mouse-clicks, see the dialogs, etc, but then it doesn't complete the task. You have to buy the thing to find out if it's going to work for you. So I uninstalled that immediately.

This is an odd issue here...online reading suggests that not all tools work for all people.

This URL provides a decent list of the available tools, but it's not complete (altho it did list things I didn't find earlier).

I did the acronis download, and knowing that Ghost was in use at the corporate office, I blasted an email there to see who used what, and how well it had worked. Responses mentioned Ghost and Acronis.

Acronis is a 15-day trial period...more than adequate for me to test-drive and see if it does what I need.

Answer is: yes, it did what I wanted, it went pretty fast...with one weird glitch that I didn't understand at first. My machine has motherboard onboard video, which it turns out is display 0, i.e., first in line for video, like the power-on self-test startup stuff you see. Acronis images your drive by a special reboot that then does the copying...which you can only see on display 0. Which meant that I was seeing nothing, because I didn't have the 2nd monitor plugged in. I could hear the disk activity (and the undesirable clicking), but I didn't know about progress. Or when it was done. This was getting alarming after a while.

Then during a phone call to a coworker who'd recommended Acronis, after he did his own separate test run and saw the right stuff, I realized that I would have too if I'd had the other monitor plugged in...too late at that point, I was already rebooting.

Anyway, it all went well, although it did take me nearly five days to get it resolved.

So: recommended tool: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Did the job for me.


I maybe still ought to do the RAID NAS thing...