Defective HDD, Norton Ghost 2003 as a backup

[allanbiats]

I have a Dell Dimension 8300 Desktop that is about one year old. It has a 'SMART' failure reported on the hard drive and that means a complete failure is likely to happen in the near future.

Before the warranty was up, Dell agreed to replace it without charge.

I don't want to lose all of the data and the configurations from a full year of use so I'd like to backup the system and then restore it after the hardware is replaced.

I have Norton System Works Professional 2003 installed and it has Norton Ghost 2003 as one of the components. I made a full backup of my system using the CDRW drive and it took 18 CDs.

Does anyone have any experience using Norton Ghost to do this?

I looked for other products and they were all in the general range of $99 mfr list and did the same thing.

After the hard drive is replaced, I should be able to restore the operating system using the Dell CD and then install Norton System Works with Ghost and then restore from my backup CDs.

If it fails, I could reinstall everything manually, but I'd rather do it from the backups.

Any suggestions?

[jay]

Make a separate backup of just your data. Let's hope the backup technology is greatly improved. Years ago, I'd do complete system backups to tape, only to discover when they were needed that they were almost useless, given all the re-jiggering I'd have to do.

[DanL]

Hard drives are so cheap, I simply installed a second drive and use the drive copy utility that comes with the drive to periodically perform a drive-to-drive copy. I did buy Ghost 2003 off EBay for $15 or so, but haven't tried it yet. The new version, Ghost 9, appears much nicer.

[AgPilotOwner]

Since Dell will most likely send you the replacement drive before you have to send the defective one back, you can wait to get that drive and then just use ghost to make a hard disk to hard disk copy. To do this, make a bootable floppy and copy the ghost.exe executable off of your hard drive on to it.

If you have to use the CD's you've made, you don't need to reinstall the OS first. You should just need a boot disk with drivers for the CD-ROM and the ghost executable.

If you have any questions let me know.

[florida_guy]

Originally posted by jay
Make a separate backup of just your data. Let's hope the backup technology is greatly improved. Years ago, I'd do complete system backups to tape, only to discover when they were needed that they were almost useless, given all the re-jiggering I'd have to do.

I had the same experience with tape and lost some precious data after having religiously backed it up.

That was when I started using Drive Image. I have used it ever since and trust it. Of course, user error could mess it up but I have used it many times to recover from installations that messed up my system.

I back it up to an external hard drive.

[TheWorm]

Originally posted by AgPilotOwner
Since Dell will most likely send you the replacement drive before you have to send the defective one back, you can wait to get that drive and then just use ghost to make a hard disk to hard disk copy. To do this, make a bootable floppy and copy the ghost.exe executable off of your hard drive on to it.

I've done this several times. Works like a charm. Works on drives of different sizes, too, if you're upgrading.

[hop23]

Originally posted by DanL
The new version, Ghost 9, appears much nicer.

That's because Symantec bought PowerQuest, and Ghost 9 builds on DriveImage.

[devin1955]

I use Ghost to backup my hard drives and am pretty happy with it. Hard drives being so cheap nowdays, I have a second drive installed in my systems for data and ghost images. Fast and you don't have to change media. I'm about ready to switch over to an external drive with a USB interface. Got the cabinet and a 200gb drive is on order.

The coolest thing about Ghost is there's a program included with SystemWorks Pro called Ghost Explorer. With it, you can open the image with an "explorer like" interface and copy individual files from the image. If you screw up a file, you can pull just that file from the image to restore it.

I haven't seen Ghost 9 yet. What's nicer about it?

[florida_guy]

Originally posted by devin1955

The coolest thing about Ghost is there's a program included with SystemWorks Pro called Ghost Explorer. With it, you can open the image with an "explorer like" interface and copy individual files from the image. If you screw up a file, you can pull just that file from the image to restore it.

Drive Image has this feature as well.

[allanbiats]

OK, thanks for the responses, it seems like I'm on the right track.

I didn't want to make the first post really really long, but I left out some parts. From the suggestions offered, I feel like I should disclose the rest, as further basis for the choices I made.

My system has a Raid 0 array with two 120 GB drives, factory installed by Dell, using a Promise Technology card. Raid 0 does not mirror the data, it puts stripes of data on both drives, speeding up the access. I have two 120 GB drives that show up as one C drive with a little less than 240 GB of space.

The warranty was expiring on July 29th and I opened the report on July 19th, when I saw the error message. They would ship the replacement drive to me in 7 to 10 days and I would have 5 days to ship the defective one back to them.

Ordinarily, that would be fine, except I was going on vacation and the drive would probably be shipped while I was gone and it would be due back before I was going to return. They offered to have a technician come out and replace it and then I would be relieved of the responsibility of getting the defective one back within the 5 day interval.

Except the technician never called until about 4 days before I was returning home, which was August 4th. Apparently, Dell had problems with the company that was doing their work in NE Florida and they hired a new company.

So now I'm stuck with a technician coming in and doing what I could do, but at least it's still a free warranty repair.

Now my plan is to recover the software after the hard drive replacement and then find out if I can convert my Raid 0 array with striping into a Raid 1 mirror, so that this would not be a problem if it happened again in the future.

To those that suggested I make a backup copy of just my data, I agree and I already did that. I also wrote up a recovery plan listing what data is on what disk and where to find the original program, if it's freeware like SpyBot and Ad Aware, and I printed it out.

[DanL]

Originally posted by devin1955

I haven't seen Ghost 9 yet. What's nicer about it?

Symantec has merged Ghost and Drive Image into one product. You can now schedule backups, perform them directly from Windows, and also do incremental backups.

[devin1955]

Originally posted by DanL


Symantec has merged Ghost and Drive Image into one product. You can now schedule backups, perform them directly from Windows, and also do incremental backups.

Darn, that does sound good. Now there's SOMETHING ELSE on my gotta have list....

[john802]

allanbiats - Why don't you try Raid 0+1 if your raid controller support it. You need 4 similar HD to do it. With Raid 0+1, you get the benefit of mirror/stripe of data. All my pc have Raid 0+1 running windows 2000 pro sp4 dual boot w/ red hat linnux 9.

[allanbiats]

Originally posted by john802
allanbiats - Why don't you try Raid 0+1 if your raid controller support it. You need 4 similar HD to do it. With Raid 0+1, you get the benefit of mirror/stripe of data. All my pc have Raid 0+1 running windows 2000 pro sp4 dual boot w/ red hat linnux 9.

I agree, that would be the ideal scenario. But at this time, buying 2 more new 120 GB hard drives would be hard to justify. There would be no measurable gain that I could show my wife for such a purchase, and my pc isn't 'mission critical', except to me of course.

But a good suggestion though, thanks.

[allanbiats]

Well, the technician showed up on 8/16. I had asked them on 3 different occasions, 'do you have the right parts to fix my problem'? I always explained that I needed a duplicate drive that matches the one that is in my Raid array.

On two occasions they said 'yes, I have the right parts that Dell sent us' and on one occasion, they said 'I guess I have the right parts, Dell sent it. We aren't supposed to open it until we get there.'

So, instead of a replacement 120 Gb hard drive to match the other one, Dell sent one 250 Gb drive. And instead of one power cable to connect to the Serial ATA hard drive, they sent a new power supply.

I didn't bother even opening up the case for the guy, I just showed him the original papers that came with the PC showing the hard drives and I gave him the number from the Dell Asset Tag. It took him 4 phone calls to get thru to Dell and he finally got thru to someone that understood the situation. After looking at my Dell asset tag number, even the Dell guy was stumped as to why they would send one 250 drive.

I said they could either send one new 120 Gb drive or another new 250 Gb drive. but they couldn't open the case until they had 2 good ones that were identical.

I really wish I would have been able to get the parts shipped to me now, but my vacation last month prevented that.

We'll see how it goes when they come out again.