Re: OT: Bootable disk images [RAID]

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Paul Breeze  on Mon, 17
Nov 2003 12:52:47 GMT


> My point in the post, however, was that a raid card will
> provide an inexpensive way of creating an identical copy
> of a system disk.

Understood. However, it's a fairly resource-expensive approach, and, moreover,
limited to desktops in practice (I've never seen a PCMCIA RAID controller, but
maybe they exist). I find it hard to justify using a second big drive just to
keep a mirror, unless of course you have a very important server. The two
drives need to be the same size, don't they? Or not necessarily...? Aren't we
also talking basically SCSI here, if you don't want to take a big speed hit?

Another approach, which worked for me when I crashed a notebook hard drive last
year (Win2K), was to use the built-in System Backup, offloading the BKF file
onto an external Firewire drive every so often, and then separately backing up
the Registry files with ERUNT (System Backup allegedly messes up with the
Registry files). It transferred my W2K system drive (C:) to a new hard disk
flawlessly (all other drives too, although not non-Windows drives using file
systems that Windows doesn't acknowledge, like HPFS).

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
-----------------------------