Will Norton Ghost allow you to back up an entire hard drive to a folder on an external firewire drive?

Maybe. Both Ghost and DriveImage (the program I use more often) allow you to take a "snapshot" of your entire C partition, compress it to save typically 35-50% in space requirements, and then put it in a folder of your choosing on another recording device. I typically have DriveImage chop the backup image into 650MB chunks so I can then burn them onto CD-R media and store them offsite (though these days I just burn them to DVD-R).

These programs don't just back up data files; they take a snapshot of literally the entire partiton. The benefit is that you can start with a completely bare new drive and load in EVERYTHING, including the operating system.

By the way, DriveImage was recently taken over by Symantec, the maker of Ghost, and a new version has been released, which I have not seen yet.

In my opinion, anyone who does not do a periodic imaging of their C drive is just asking for disaster.

The reason for the "maybe" is because my version of DriveImage runs in DOS, and typically such a program can't see the firewire port unless the appropriate driver is also loaded. Check with Symantec.

I'm looking for something that will just make a realtime copy of everything on c:\ to the new drive x:\, then allow me to assign c:\ to the new drive and never miss a beat. I'd be afraid of the compression and stuff. I used to hear about a program called Partition Magic. Does anybody know if that could be used for what I need to do?

I'm really ignorant on this issue, but I've been told that you can transfer an entire C drive if you go from one computer to another. Meaning you'd have to install your new drive on a separate computer 1st. Then take it out and put it on your old one, but don't hold me to it, I've never tried this.

I think utilities that come with the new drive will help you. I know MaxBLAST3 that comes with Maxtor drives had a "drive-to-drive copy" utility. You connect your new drive into your system, set it up as X: or whatever, and then make an exact copy to the new drive. Then remove the old C:, redesignate the X: to C: and you're all done.

MaxBlast3 also has a tutorial to guide you through the process.

You can also find it at maxtor.com under worldwide support. I suppose WD and Seagate have similar utilities.

Both Western Digital and Seagate hard drives come with a migration utility. Install the new drive on any available IDE port, boot up the install disk, let it auto-install the new drive, and then it will ask if you wish to move a current drive's contents to the new drive. I haven't tried Seagate's utility yet, but the Western Digital one works flawlessly, if rather slowly. Last time i tried it i moved about 8GB in about 3 hours. That's ridiculously slow, but i didn't care as i spent the time heading off to dinner and a movie with some friends. When i got back i removed the original C: drive, moved the new drive to it's spot (primary master) and booted. Not a single hitch except that some software needed to be reactivated since it detected critical sectors being in different locations or the hardware change.

Thanks for all the ideas. I use Maxtors and I think I have a CD somewhere in my junkpile of their Maxblast utility. I never used it before because I always used the disk management tools in Windows to do all the formatting and assigning letters and stuff. Those tools don't seem to have anything that does what I need now, though. Anybody who has used the Maxtor utility, will it let me format the new drive NTFS as well as do the migration from the old disk. If I do the formatting in Windows can Maxblast still be used to do the migration? I guess I'm in for some experimenting.

You can download the Maxtor utility from their site, if you can't find the CD.

Ghost and DriveImage are the products to use if you want a commercial solution. Their backup capability is really important.

PartitionMagic is a very useful utility, but not what you need for this task.

Finally got around to installing the new disk drive. Copying old drive to new using Maxtor MaxBlast utility was childs play. Thanks to those who suggested it.

Naturally, now that I copied them to a new drive, VV3, and V4 no longer run. I get error saying "program not properly installed." I assume this will force me to do an uninstall, directory delete, reinstall and re-register thing on both programs, or does anyone know if I can fix this without doing all that? Also, for V4, if a reinstall is necessary, should I also uninstall and reinstall all the .net framework stuff after reinstalling V4? Thanks for any advice.

I know this is late for you 2Road but I did a lot of research about imaging programs a couple of months ago. I'm not a Symantec fan and I was concerned about a messy merging of Ghost and Driveimage. I am now using a product called Acronis Trueimage. It's very good. Images can be backed up to or restored from a firewire drive and any image can be mounted as a new drive letter in Windows and files can be dragged and dropped from it.

>>...Trueimage...

I am definitely going to check this out.

I have been a long-time PowerQuest user and really like(d) thier products.

I remember what Symantec did to WinFax Pro when they bought that from Delrina. They completely made it fat, cludgy, and in general, a much less efficienct program. I'll bet the same happens to Drive Image, which is a terrific program as well as Partition Magic.

Thaks for the word about Trueimage!

2road

if you added a second drive, you changed the drive letters

You have to check and see where the programs WERE and change the drive letters to match.

Sounds like you want this as a fail safe. In that case you set the two drives up as a mirrored pair. Everything is written to both drives at the same time. If one fails, you can keep running. You can then replace the dead drive and tell the OS to rebuild the mirror. We use this all the time for critical systems. Not a good idea for your video drive, but OS and programs it rocks.

You can also take one of the drives from the mirror to another machine and run it as primary and it will look just like it did in the old machine.