How do I mirror drives in XP?

"Bobby" wrote:

> I recently installed a new HD (120Gb) to replace my old drive (60Gb). I
> would like to use my old drive to "mirror" my new drive so that I always
> have a completely up-to-date copy of my entire system in case something goes
> wrong.

Be careful about what you wish for. If you really mean "mirror", as
in RAID Level 1, wherein data is almost simultaneously written to both
hard drives, if "something goes wrong", it could go wrong on both drives
simultaneously. Mirroring only protects you from a single hard drive
failing physically. If the problem involves loss of a software setting or
corruption of a file, it would happen on both hard drives.

*TimDaniels*

I don't need instant copying. I'm just looking for something to copy my
files from one HD to another.

"Timothy Daniels" <TDaniels@NoSpamDot.com> wrote in message
news:ArOdnf5_8byRMlqiRVn-jw@comcast.com...

>
> "Bobby" wrote:

> > I recently installed a new HD (120Gb) to replace my old drive (60Gb). I
> > would like to use my old drive to "mirror" my new drive so that I always
> > have a completely up-to-date copy of my entire system in case something

goes

> > wrong.

>
> Be careful about what you wish for. If you really mean "mirror", as
> in RAID Level 1, wherein data is almost simultaneously written to both
> hard drives, if "something goes wrong", it could go wrong on both drives
> simultaneously. Mirroring only protects you from a single hard drive
> failing physically. If the problem involves loss of a software setting or
> corruption of a file, it would happen on both hard drives.
>
> *TimDaniels*

"Bobby" clarified:

> "Timothy Daniels" wrote:

> > "Bobby" wrote:

> > > I recently installed a new HD (120Gb) to replace my old drive (60Gb). I
> > > would like to use my old drive to "mirror" my new drive so that I always
> > > have a completely up-to-date copy of my entire system in case something
> > > goes wrong.

> >
> > Be careful about what you wish for. If you really mean "mirror", as
> > in RAID Level 1, wherein data is almost simultaneously written to both
> > hard drives, if "something goes wrong", it could go wrong on both drives
> > simultaneously. Mirroring only protects you from a single hard drive
> > failing physically. If the problem involves loss of a software setting or
> > corruption of a file, it would happen on both hard drives.

>
> I don't need instant copying. I'm just looking for something to copy my
> files from one HD to another.

It sounds more like you want to "image" your current hard drive. That
duplicates everything on a second hard drive. Software such as Norton
Ghost, or PowerQuest Drive Image, or Acronis True Image, or
Future Systems Solutions Casper XP, or R-Studio R-Drive Image, etc.
can do that. Why not go one step further and make the image bootable?
That way, if the 1st HD fails, you can just pop in the 2nd HD and away
you go! Better than that, if you want to be up and running in the minimum
amount of lost time (say you're doing stock day trading), keep the 2nd
hard drive in the computer all connected, and select which HD you want
to boot up by setting the BIOS' boot sequence? You already have the
imaging software utility to do this in Ghost. If it's anything like Drive
Image,
it's called "copy drive", and be sure to mark the partition it's put in as
"active". It's the equivalent of making an image on the 2nd HD and then
restoring it there in situ.

Once the source HD is imaged onto the destination HD, immediately
disconnect the source HD and *then* boot up the destination HD for the
1st time. You can do this by physically substituting the destination HD in
place of the source HD, or by simply putting the destination HD 1st in the
boot sequence, ahead of the source HD. After this initial boot into the
destination HD is accomplished, you may thereafter boot into either HD
by simply resetting the BIOS boot sequence. If you have 2 IDE channels
available for the HDs, you may (after the copy) put each HD on its own
IDE channel, thereby speeding up HD-to-HD file transfers a small amount.
In such a configuration, it doesn't matter how the HDs are jumpered if they
are the only HDs on their channel (i.e. they can both be jumpered as Slave
or whatever). If the two OSes recognize each other as OSes (not just as
file structures) and they appear in the WindXP boot manager's boot.ini file,
giving you a choice at boot-up of which OS to boot, you can go with this or
revert them both back to lone OSes by editing the boot.ini file. See my
Nov 17th posting "Multi-boot Windows XP without special software" to
glean just enough about the boot.ini file syntax to modify this aspect of it.
In either case, be aware that the booted OS will see the contents of the
other HD as being the contents of the "other" drive, and the booted OS
will always consider its own HD to be the C: drive. That the booted OS
will see the other HD is handy if you want to backup just a few files.
Instead of imaging the entire HD, you can just drag-'n-drop the files over
to the other HD.

*TimDaniels*