BlueMak

I want to buy an external drive, to clone the C: drive so that when/if it fails, I just replace it and go back to work without losing more than at worse a day of changes. Any complete free (for the software side) suggestions?
The C drive is a 500GB one.
Vista 64.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Tyrsonswood

I use Easeus partition manager... It has a "drive copy wizard" that can make a drive clone even on two different size drives. (just as long as the destination drive is large enough for the data)

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Judas

does it need to be external?

I was going to suggest since your motherboard (according to asus) has the ICH10R chipset, why not get another 500gb or larger Hardrive.. be it internal or external (internet should be faster)... and make sure it had SATA/eSATA and Raid 1 your drives so you never have to worry about one drive screwing up and losing anything more then it takes to boot from the other drive in a situation like that.

Just need to switch to raid mode.... which MIGHT require (but not always) switching to the raid mode on the controller rather then sticking with ACHI or IDE which "can" sometimes require a full windows reinstall....

Just a thought... i'm a fan of backups made on the fly.. and raid 1 you can't really beat for 0 downtime and backup redundancy... even with an external drive.

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blibbax

Sorry to slightly thread hijack, but this is relevant: what exactly happens when a drive in a raid 1 setup fails? You just boot up the PC and the motherboard sees one good drive and no raid array? What if the motherboard fails? Can you plug one of the raid 1 drives into another PC and still access everything?

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Judas

In the case of a raid 1 array failing....you bootup, it shows the raid array as failed/inconsistant... it proceeds to boot from the other drive if the drive has completely failed...

However in a case of a partial failure.... where the raid arrays knows something is wrong.. it stops all read/writes on the other drive in order to prevent potential corruption, and the machine may attempt to continue booting from the bad drive... if this is the case, all that is required is to change the boot order in the bios.. OR simply unplug the bad drive and let it boot at which point the raid array will inform you that the drive is completely dead/disconnected.

After you get a replacement HD.. just plug it in (For me, raid 1 allows me to hot plug so i don't even have to power down the machine) make sure to boot from the good drive, and when your in windows, open up the Intel Rapid Storage Technology windows, it'll inform you of the conditions... and you can select the new unused drive and set as "make mirror" or "rebuild raid 1 array using this drive" (recently i haven't had to do this and i know the latest 1.08 driver/interface has made changes)... either way there is an option to recreate the array and use the new drive as mirror.... it'll automatically format and start restoring the consistency/Rebuilding of the raid 1 array... meanwhile you can go on your merry way doing whatever while it's doing it.. you can even shut down the machine and when you boot up.. it'll continue to restore all your files..

a 500gb raid 1 array using SATA II even with it filled to capacity on an intel 920 rig i had built, took approximately 45 minutes to rebuild.

It's pretty damn flawless.. and the few customers I've setup with raid 1 that actually have had to use it in the last 6 years I've been building the raid 1 arrays for people..... 2 of them have had a hardrive failure.... one of them isn't tech savy at all and managed to easily continue working.. and was only informed of the issue by the Intel Rapid Storage Technology interface that told him a drive had failed and to replace it. The other guy is a little more savy.. and his array failed on the primary boot device.... at which point he didn't know how to change the boot order, and he popped the side off.. unplug the bad drive.. and continued working, plugged in the new one... let it rebuild.. and wasn't out more then 5-10 minutes TOTAL from the time the problem happens until he replaced the drive himself...

it's quite great, VERY user friendly and fast.

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BlueMak

Yes, external only. I have no desire sticking another HDD inside the case unless I absolutely have to. ie when/if the C drive fails.
If I did, I would just replace the original HDD.

No RAID. Not now, not ever.

I am mainly asking for software solution, which is free and works through USB2.0 or eSATA.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

CJLMTLCA

Try Backup and Restore Center in Control Panel. It will let you create a restore disc too, so you can boot from the disc and restore your C: in case of failure.

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Judas

why not raid... ever? what's wrong with it? I'm not talking about raid 0..

You can still raid 1 an array with esata

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Tyrsonswood

This will only work if both drives are the same or the replacement drive is larger, Windows solutions have limitations. That's why I use Easeus.

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BlueMak

It supports external drives too? And it is a complete drive clone utility?

Because I don't want to. It's 6am.


Well, how would one go to clone a hard drive to a smaller drive? I thought that all such programs require same or larger drive?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Tyrsonswood

Is the drive to be cloned full? Then the destination drive needs to be the same or larger. If it's not full then the disk copy will work with a smaller drive, just as long as the data is smaller than the destination drive.

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BlueMak

LOL, I did not think of that. Yes it's almost full.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Tipstaff

I'd go with Tyrsons suggestion of EaseUS. The Home Edition is completely free, and should do the job nicely for you.

There is one catch: you can only create a bootable CD with the Professional Edition. You can still clone the drive from within Windows (easily done via the Wizard | Clone Disk Wizard option), but as I said, only the Pro version allows you to create the WinPE or Linux bootable CD (note: they charge more money for the version that has the WinPE disk included).

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BlueMak

Not sure if I would even need said CD. Without it, can't I just remove the old HDD, put in the clone and have the system run like new? (well, "new")

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Tyrsonswood

Yes.... it will boot from the drive, you shouldn't need a CD.

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