Hard Drive Clone
 

I have a HD for one machine at work. And I have a the same exact machine running beside it. Well the second machines HD went bad. So I gotta get it up and running ASAP. So I thought I would just clone the first machines drive. But everthing I try does not work.

Always boot failing on me. I tried just a strait copy. I took both drives out of both machines and hooked them to a diffrent computer and copied the files. These machines run off old dos. Its like 32mb on the hard drive. And it wouldnt boot. And then I tried seagate disk wizard copy files. I was going to try the setup net drive part of disk wizard but it kept tring to clone my C: to it. And this was not the C: drive I wanted cloned.

Any advise on how to get this drive cloned. I always thought you could just copy and paste the files with dos.

If you could acquire a copy of Norton Ghost it would probably work great. We use it at work everyday and it's never failed us no matter what's on the HDD.

I would rather grab a copy of Hiren's BootCD 9.2 - http://codeseekers.blogspot.com/2007...bootcd-92.html

It is an extremely useful boot CD (ala MiniPE without the livecd windows gui). It boots extremely fast, and it should work for what you are looking for. There are a number of cloning utilities on it to choose from. Even a barebones copy of Ghost, and the live CD portion of Acronis for imaging and restoration.

dos, you say? You need to either format the first drive as a boot drive (format /s I think) or you can run "sys c:" to transfer the bootableness over first before copying everything else. Really you should be able to do the format before copying files (via a boot floppy).

Geez - this is knowledge circa 1990 ;)

edit: link RE format command:
http://www.computerhope.com/formathl.htm

Well I never did get the a second drive working. Ended up putting the one working drive back into the machine. Had to get production running. I do still have a copy of the files If I can find a way to get the drive to be bootable.

Right now I have the Files on my main HD and the HD I need to be dos bootable hooked up as a second HD. Now I know I can copy the files over easily. Now getting it to boot is a nother story. I will give you guys suggestions a try and see what happens.

Thanks Again for coming threw with some great advise :-) you guys are life saver.