Best Clone/Image Software?

[Duke of Rezin]

This is kind of along the lines of the previous thread, but does anyone have any suggestions for the best drive cloning software. My target drive is only 30 gigs. I have less than 30 gigs to clone and I want to clone to the 30 gig, create a RAID 0 configuration and then reclone to the RAID 0. I looked at Norton Ghost 2003, but it seems to have a 50 gig minimum requirement. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.

[confus-ed]

Errr what previous thread he said all confus-ed & what 50 gig minimum do we refer to ? Links would be very handy, then I & others might know what the hell you are taking about

[Duke of Rezin]

Errr what previous thread he said all confus-ed & what 50 gig minimum do we refer to ? Links would be very handy, then I & others might know what the hell you are taking about

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/, and http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=55842, hopefully this will help.

[TripleRLtd]

http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/, and http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=55842, hopefully this will help.

There is no 50 GB minimum for Ghost.
the rest is still confus-ing, however.

[confus-ed]

You kave been doing too much of your name

Do you mean this bit ?

50 MB hard disk space available

That's a little less

Ghost ought to be able to do what you want ... once you get your measurements in order

[Duke of Rezin]

You kave been doing too much of your name

Do you mean this bit ?

That's a little less

Ghost ought to be able to do what you want ... once you get your measurements in order

Thanks, that's what I wanted to know. What I want to do involves 3 different drives, one of which has not been installed yet. My current installation is on drive #1. I want to clone that installation to drive #3. I would then take drive #'s 1 and 2 (the new drive, identical to drive #1) and create and format a RAID 0 configuration. I would then move the installation from drive #3 to the RAID array. The reason for this is I don't know how to do a clean install of Windows XP Pro without having to use an activation, and for some reason this current installation has been really stable and trouble free so I don't want to lose it.

FYI: it's been many years since I've done the Rezin bit, but I used the moniker way back when playing D&D and you are, as far as I know, the only one who has ever caught on.

[confus-ed]

FYI: it's been many years since I've done the Rezin bit, but I used the moniker way back when playing D&D and you are, as far as I know, the only one who has ever caught on.

... never figured out why I'm soooooooooooo confus-ed sometimes ?

Will your raid card not do 0 & 1 together? (striping & mirroring or is a 'cheapo' one ?) or do you intend to backup your raid somehow 'else'?

However I do have some confus-ed-ness to share - since when has xp pro needed activation - it doesn't - thats only home .... surley ?

[Duke of Rezin]

... never figured out why I'm soooooooooooo confus-ed sometimes ?

Will your raid card not do 0 & 1 together? (striping & mirroring or is a 'cheapo' one ?) or do you intend to backup your raid somehow 'else'?

However I do have some confus-ed-ness to share - since when has xp pro needed activation - it doesn't - thats only home .... surley ?

No, its a cheapo Promise 376 controller integrated in an MSI Delta-ILSR. I had bought the smaller WD Raptor, drive #1, to try out SATA (strangely the controller does some 0+1 setup on a single drive ??). Wouldn't you know, I'm actually running out of room and I wanted to do this before I exceed the capacity of drive #3, a loud slower and 30 gig Quantum Fireball so I bought another Raptor (drive #2) and thought I'd go for broke with RAID 0. Hopefully, if for some reason one of the Raptors died and I have, say, 50 gigs of data, I will still be able to at least recover from the point when the image was made on the Quantum. Maybe not an ideal setup but an optimal one that would keep me from starting from scratch and not have to spend any more money.

As far as the XP activation goes, I'm using an OEM XP Pro installation disk and it has harassed me to activate whenever I've done an install, Hell, even just a repair installation. If you know how to circumvent or avoid that please let me know.

[confus-ed]

Right so you are clear about the risks of striping your raid over two disks & know you need to make sure of your data backup seperately ? - You do, I'm sure - but I like to make it clear

I'm still puzzled about this activation business with xp pro though - as far as I know it never needs activation - only home - you are 'sure' about your copy ? (as in - its a real one ?)...

[Duke of Rezin]

Yea, this has happened with two separate disks, one purchased from www.buycheapsoftware.com and one from ZipZoomFly. They both had all the iridescent holographic wizardry and M$ did activate them both. I had used blank drives, booted from the cd, formatted along the way and they installed from there. After the installations were finished, the Activation ballons started popping up with greater frequency as the days ticked by. I've never gone the full thirty days to see what might happen though and I'm just simply ignorant about how to get that process stopped.