Re: Drive Image--OT

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- John  wrote:

> One way round that is to have a further (3rd)
> bootable partition,

a.k.a. your "maintenance" boot partition, specifically
created and maintained for such purposes.

> so that the stuff one wants to
> copy is mere data (not a running OS).

> And this is doing it using the simplest possible
> media - good old IDE hard disks. Using stuff like
> firewire adds to the complexity - as you imply.

Yeah, I don't know about laptops -- whether any of
them support TWO *internal* HDDs . . . which implies 2
IDE controllers (such as I have in the Shuttle XPC
small form factor machine), or at least a Master /
Slave connector. Failing that, your best and most
reliable solution (for cloning a laptop HDD) might be
to take it out of the laptop and connect both it and
the clone target HDD (which as I said before should
ideally be the same make, model, and size) to the IDE
controller(s) of a desktop system.

DFSEE supports a lot of USB, but not firewire. I
haven't heard of *any* cloner program that supports
firewire. BUT, even if one did, there is probably
another problem, in going the internal --> external
route. A friend of mine used DFSEE to do this, over a
USB connection. He tells me it took about 8 hours !
(I don't know the size of the HDDs involved.) So, for
jobs like this, USB may not be nearly as fast as we
had been led to believe.

> Never having put one to the test, I don't know if
> partition managers do this job all on their own ..

Depends which one. There have been quite a few of
them, some relatively obscure, with different feature
sets.


Jordan