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