>
> >    What is the best way to copy everthing from the current drive to the
> > backup drive?
>
>   The absolute best way is to use a disk-copying product like
> DiskCopy or Ghost (was freeware, but now bought by Symantec).  The
> (close) second best way is to use the "partition copy" feature in
> Partition Magic.
>   The FREE way is to use xcopy from a Win95 command line (NOT a DOS
> one...) with the switches "/r/i/c/h/k/e/y", which should copy
> everything you need.
>
> > Question #4
> >
> > Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
>   It's not just a case of snapshotting the drive once -- the
> alternate has to be kept (almost!) up to date to be useful.
>   If your situation really justifies dedicating a drive as a warm
> standby, you should probably be looking at some kind of RAID 0
> ("mirroring") approach -- I believe someone makes an EIDE controller
> that provides this feature, although RAID hardware is more common on
> SCSI controllers.
>
> David G

David,
   You are right about the the EIDE controller for the RAID and its made
by Promise Technologies.  They make
the Drive Defender, the Fast Track and also a new BX motherboard that
has RAID connections right on the M/B.

   My problem is this....to use these RAID tools you need to mirror two
IDENTICAL EIDE drives.  The system I'm working on has a 3.2 drive.  I
would need to buy another Western Digital 3.2 and one of the RAID
controllers mentioned above to make this work.  In the future if one of
the drives fail, the other drive continues and I can then replace the
failed drive with another Western Digital 3.2 EIDE.

   However, I don't want to do that for a puny 3.2 gig drive.  Also, I
may have trouble finding a new one 2-3 years down the road.  If I had
and 8.4 or a 16.8 to work with, it would be a differant story.,but...

   So what I would like to do is basically use another drive as a backup
drive and say once a week do a xcopy32 to bring it up to date.


Since it supsosed that you can only have one active partition on the
Boot drive and not on a slave drive or the master on the secondary
controller,  How would I get the backup to be bootable when the current
drive fails.

   I appreciate your time spent here

John

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                        Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>