Dear Listers

Promise makes a eide card which does this very thing. Visit their web
site for all the possibilities (www.promise.com)

Joel Bluming
[log in to unmask]
ICQ #5875120

On Fri, 20 Nov 1998 22:05:18 -0800 David Gillett <[log in to unmask]>
writes:
>On 20 Nov 98 at 14:25, johnfarrow wrote:
>
>>     Suppose you have one hard drive (IDE) and you buy another as a
>> backup.
>> You want to copy everything from the current operating drive to the
>new
>> drive so that in case of a failure of the current one, you can
>simply
>> have the backup take over.
>>
>> Question #1
>>
>>    How can you format/fdisk the new drive so that it has an active
>> partion and be ready to boot incase of failure of the current drive.
> I
>> have heard that you can only have one active partion in the system,
>so
>> how do you get around this?
>
>  Things get dicy if you have more than one active partition on the
>BOOT drive.  Unless the BIOS visits other drives while looking for a
>bootable target, active partitions on other drives cannot be a
>problem.
>  What you can't do is USE FDISK to set a partition active on any but
>the hard drive 0.  Various 3rd-party utilities, such as Partition
>Magic, have no problem letting you do this.
>
>> Question #2
>>
>>    Do you format the new drive from windows 95 or from DOS?
>
>  Yes.  Well, actually, I usually boot 95 to the command line ("DOS")
>to use FDISK or FORMAT; I recommend using the Win95 versions of these
>tools if you will be using FAT32.
>
>> Question #3
>>
>>    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
>
>            PCBUILD maintains many useful files for download
>              on our web site - visit our download page at:
>                     http://nospin.com/pc/files.html
>

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