disk imaging

I am still researching this but I was wondering if anyone here may lead me to a faster answer.

We have a mission critical machine that runs windows 2000 and several apps. We also have a couple pre-configured hdd that we can place in this machine, that I did not take part in setting up.

Can I take one of these off the shelf pre-configured hdd and plug it into a usb enclosure and then ghost it. And if I can will that image work to apply to another hdd and place it into our pc?

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

dynamik

What do you mean when you say the drives are pre-configured?

Is this the system drive or just an extra data drive?

What are you ultimately trying to do? Is this just for backup, are you moving to another machine, etc?

dubbs112

Yes it is the system drive. And they already have windows and all the necessary apps installed.

Basically in the event of a crash I can pull the hd and replace it with one off the shelf and only have minimal downtime.

What I want to know i guess is if I can take a hd out of a functioning pc and plug it into my laptop with an enclosure and ghost it then apply that image to another hard drive and have it be functional.

dynamik

Ghost needs to run outside of windows to ghost the system drive, correct? I haven't used for many years. I assume it recognizes USB drives, but I'm not sure.

Will you be restoring the image to the same machine once you replace the failed HD or will you be moving it to a new machine? You should be fine if you restore it to the same machine, but you'll likely have problems if you move it to a new machine. You'll have all your data, but Windows might fail to load because of the new machine requiring a different HAL, and you may have to reactivate Windows if the hardware has changed significantly. However, you could do a repair installation to change the HAL while maintaining your applications and settings. That would be quicker than reinstalling everything, but it gets kind of messy.

I assume the reason you want to ghost the drive twice is that you will first be ghosting the laptop drive to an external USB drive and then you will be ghosting that drive back to a laptop drive. Is that correct?

I'd just try it out and see how far you can go. I would, at the very minimum, try connecting a USB drive and ghosting your existing drive. If your BIOS supports the option of booting of USB drives, you could test the ghosted drive by booting off it right then and there.

shednik

dynamik wrote:

Ghost needs to run outside of windows to ghost the system drive, correct? I haven't used for many years. I assume it recognizes USB drives, but I'm not sure.

In my experience I have always used ghost with BartPE, and have had no issues with saving an image to an external USB device.

dynamik wrote:

Will you be restoring the image to the same machine once you replace the failed HD or will you be moving it to a new machine? You should be fine if you restore it to the same machine, but you'll likely have problems if you move it to a new machine. You'll have all your data, but Windows might fail to load because of the new machine requiring a different HAL, and you may have to reactivate Windows if the hardware has changed significantly. However, you could do a repair installation to change the HAL while maintaining your applications and settings. That would be quicker than reinstalling everything, but it gets kind of messy.

Two words to fix that issue "Shadow Protect", an imaging program that we now use at my company with BartPE. I don't know all the details but i worked with one of the the network admins about two weeks ago to fix an issue and i had my first exposure to this. You are able to take an image just like you would with ghost, but its done in half the amount of time plusyou can make changes to the image. For example the guy I worked with took an image of a server we were having issues with and restored it on a completley different box. Before hand he made some changes that Shadow Protect will allow you to edit the hardware properties. Another feature that is avaliable is I beleive for anything XP/2003 and newer the images can be taken live, it seems to be a great tool for our company. Hope this helps

nel636

so what is shadow project? and where can we get more info on it?

shednik

http://www.storagecraft.com/products/ShadowProtectIT/

There are a few different versions we used the IT edition...

dynamik

Interesting information shednik - thanks!

shednik

No problem it's great stuff makes my life alot easier when i have to give someone a new PC or have to swap out servers...

nel636

pretty pricey edition!

shednik

We support close to 450 users locally, couldn't tell you a number for our remote clients, and a data center housing about 300 servers...so we need to have good software to create images and back stuff up with. So the price was justified

dubbs112

Ok so this is what I did...

I had a pc that was not on the network. I could not install Ghost. I removed the HD from this machine and put it into my external usb enclosure and plugged it into my laptop.

I then ghosted this drive (while in the enclosure) and applied the image to a brand new HD (also with an enclosure) and stuck the newly imaged drive into the pc, and the pc booted right to windows no problem!!!

There were a few drivers that re-installed at start up but the pc and apps were functioning perfectly.
I never would have thought it would work until I saw it for myself.

WanBoy67

Further to Shednik's suggestion to use ShadowProtect you could also use Acronis SnapDeploy & Universal Deploy - although I see you have successfully ghosted your drive anyway.

The Universal Deploy addition will allow you apply specific HALs for different hardware specs so you can use the same image over an entire organisation even though the machines could be different. At $20 for SnapDeploy & then $12 for the Universal Deploy it beats $3500 though obviously it will depend on how many licenses you might need. I couldn't see any extra features that it has over GSS or SnapDeploy. The idea of Universal Deploy is a new & cool feature though; so Acronis might have a convert in me, GSS can't do that, yet. I must say I haven't tested Universal Deploy yet but have used GSS & SnapDeploy.

Had a problem recently with cloning Vista Business on to Dell Dimension C521s. Eventually ended up using BartPE and Ghost GSS 2.0. The Bootable ISO made by GSS wouldn't boot with the C521s. The SnapDeploy CD wouldn't boot on the C521s either - just hung when you went to make an image. It only happened on those C521s other PCs were fine, like I say a BartPE bodge using 1 or 2 files from Ghost v8 and the newer GSS 2.0 eventually worked. GSS 2.0 is Vista ready and SnapDeploy isn't yet - not that either CD worked for me. I prefer the BartPE route because you can have other utils on the CD as well and your using the latest actual XP drivers for the network card(s); assuming you've added them to the CD. Not NDIS2 or packet drivers. SnapDeploy has a BartPE plugin also, available from support.

But it's a small price to pay for a few spare HDs & a cloning package when your server(s) go belly up and your up s**t's creek without a paddle.

http://www.symantec.com/smb/products/features.jsp?pcid=cli_mgmt&pvid=ghost
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdeploy/
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/snapdeploy/universal-deploy.html

SRTMCSE

Symantec has a product called "Backup Exec System Recovery" it was formally called LiveState Recovery. They have a desktop and server edition. The beauty of the product is it runs inside of windows and allows for restoration to dissimilar hardware and VMware virtual machines. On a test of a Windows 2003 server it took about an hour to restore it to a virtual machine and bring it up with no changes in DNS or anything. Brought it up and took the other machine down and it was near seamless.

We're testing another server to support (a groupwise email server on windows 2000...yea I know...weird) and it takes a little more changes upon restoration but I attribute that to the bastardization of running NDS on Windows + Groupwise.

ajs1976

SRTMCSE wrote:

We're testing another server to support (a groupwise email server on windows 2000...yea I know...weird) and it takes a little more changes upon restoration but I attribute that to the bastardization of running NDS on Windows + Groupwise.

I setup a server like that a long time ago. It was an interesting migration.

Kasor

I'm responsible for my company portion of network that using Novell Client for Window within Novell NW svr.

What is a good product to conduct imaging on Novell related desktop?

I'm looking into the network function, too. So, I don't have to image every HD individually. Even we don't have much of workstations, but when they break. It will be a difficult time for me to install all the software again.

Lee H

I had a pc that was not on the network. I could not install Ghost. I removed the HD from this machine and put it into my external usb enclosure and plugged it into my laptop.

I then ghosted this drive (while in the enclosure) and applied the image to a brand new HD (also with an enclosure) and stuck the newly imaged drive into the pc, and the pc booted right to windows no problem!!!

There were a few drivers that re-installed at start up but the pc and apps were functioning perfectly.
I never would have thought it would work until I saw it for myself

If the drive itself is OK, then why not partition the drive C & D, Ghost C to D. In the event of a windows failure you simply put in your Ghost floppy and image C from D. Providing its fully syspreped all you will need to do is give it a name.

Much easier than swapping out drives, and may even be quicker.

Let me know if that helps.

Lee H