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The Debate Over Hard Disk Drive Cloning: Drive-Imaging Software's Power Carries A Heavy Burden

Hard Disk Cloning: Hard Drive Data Recovery Article

I want an exact copy of my hard drive,” you say. “I want to be able later to restore everything back to the way it is now.

You could find a backup utility to do this, or you could take a “snap-shot” of your system with Roxio’s GoBack or Windows Me/XP’s System Restore. Or, if you’re feeling intrepid, you could step up to a power-user utility called drive-image software.

Drive imaging, also called disk cloning, ghost imaging, or just plain ghosting (as in Symantec’s Norton Ghost), saves the entire contents of a hard drive or partition (a section of your hard drive with its own drive letter) to an optionally compressed file. You can restore an image file, meaning your hard drive’s or parti-tion’s snapshot, in case you run into problems after installing an application or changing a setting.

Among drive-imaging software’s advantages is its ability to restore your entire system to a snapshot without the constant drag on system resources from rollback utilities such as GoBack and System Restore. Some drive-image programs even overlap the features of backup utilities. You can generally set them to create images at scheduled times. Some can even back up just the data that has changed since the last image. None of the drive—imaging software we tested let us back up specific files or folders as a backup utility would, although they let us browse and restore individual files from within drive images.

Drive-imaging software also can move your OS (operating system) and data to a different hard drive, prefer-ably on the same PC or an identical one. However, don’t confuse it with the mans’ migration software titles on the market, such as PowerQuests Drive Copy or Acronis MigrateEasv Deluxe. These utilities generally help you transfer your old computers settings and files to a new system, with the added advantage of being able to do so from one OS to a different one that’s already loaded on the new computers hard drive. If you use drive-image software to move your old system’s OS to a new one with preloaded software, you might accidentally copy over your new PC’s software bundle.

Still, drive-image software can speed up the process of installing the same software to an exact duplicate PC, especially when you’re rolling out the same OS and software package to a group of identical PCs. Mass migrations require more enterprise-level drive imaging software, such as PowerQuest’s DeployCenter or Altiris RapidDeplov.) In short, you can use certain drive-image utilities to back up your system and migrate files, but you may find that applications specifically sold for these purposes are more suitable.

Dan Pelosi, manager of business development for CBL Data Recovery Technologies, praises drive-imaging utilities for their speedy restorations. He also mentions that drive-image backups are most reliable when properly written to CDs or tapes and stored offsite. However, Pelosi cautions that after you restore a drive image, your OS will need drivers for all the hardware you have installed since you made the image and could encounter conflicts.

“Drive imaging is a procedure/tool that should not be looked at lightly,” Pelosi says. “Yes, it can decrease the chances of data loss because you essentially have a copy of your data, but in a few short minutes, it can potentially create a catastrophic data loss if used incorrectly.

Pelosi said CBL assists many new customers who need data recovered because of improperly used or malfunctioning drive-image software. Drive imaging definitely isn’t a type of utility for novices vet, but it can be a powerful tool in the hands of a careful user.

How We Tested
We tested PowerQuest Drive Image 2002, Norton Ghost 2002, and Acronis Truelmage (Note: \ VCOM declined to submit the current version of Image Commander, found only in its Drive Works utility suite, hinting at improved features in the future.) We installed each utility on a Windows XP Professional system with an Athlon XP 1 700+ processor, 256MB of DDR SDRAM (double-data- rate synchronous dynamic RAM), an 80GB and a 20GB hard drive, a card, and a TEAC 12X/8X/32X (write/ rewrite/read) CD- RW (CD- rewrite-able) drive. When applicable, we tested each utility’s network capabilities over a 100Mbps (megabits per second) LAN (local-area network). Our second computer had a 233MHz K6, 128MB of SDRAM, a SOHOware network card, an 80GB hard drive, and Windows 98.

We saved drive-image files of the 2.4GB WinXP boot partition of the Athlon PC’s 80GB hard drive to its 20GB drive, and also to the network computers hard drive where applicable. We also saved a drive image of a smaller, non-OS partition to a CD-RW. Finally, we restored (or tried to restore) our partitions using the image files we had created.

Drive Image 2002 can make and restore image files of partitions within Windows, as long as neither the OS nor your applications are currently using any files stored in those partitions. If your partition has files open for use, as will your OS partition, Drive Image will reboot your PC to a DOS-based GUI (graphical user interface). Even in DOS, the program can write image files to your CD-RW drive, including SCSI Small Computer System Interface) and PC Card external drives, and removable media such as Zip or Jaz disks. It installs under \Vin95c (OSR2.5)/98/Me/NT4 Workstation/2000/XP and supports FAT (file allocation table), FAT32 (32-hit FAT), NTFS (New Technology File System), and Linux’s Ext2 (second extended) file systems.

Drive Image 2002 has a very friendly format that’s quite easy to follow. PowerQuest gave it a backup scheduling feature and lmageExplorer to browse or restore files inside images as well as the capabilities to copy one drive to another and create a backup partition as needed. The program also can save images to and restore them from another computer over a LAN, but only if you make special boot diskettes in its Boot Disk Builder application, as with Norton Ghost below. You’ll have to enter networking information and assign drive letter(s) to the other PC’s hard drive UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path in a format like this: \\PC Name\Directory\File.xxx. You’ll also have to find a driver for your NIC (network inter-face card) if it’s not in Drive Image’s list, although the Boot Disk Builder provides a link to an updated driver list online.

Drive Image had no trouble saving a highly compressed image file of our WinXP partition to our local and networked hard drives, nor one of a smaller partition to CI)-RW. How-ever, the whole enterprise is kind of pointless if you can’t restore a partition from that image.

Such was our luck with Drive Image. It rebooted into the pre-Windows GUI to restore our WinXP partition, but it bombed out with a write error about one third of the way through. We could no longer boot to the half-restored OS to start Drive Image’s Windows interface, so we had to resort to restarting the system with the Rescue Diskettes we had made during installation. Inexplicably, the Rescue Diskettes’ GUI could see our floppy drive and our CD-RW drive, but it could not the second hard drive with our drive image file on it.

Eventually, we had to use Norton Ghost to bail Drive Image out. Before doing anything else in this head-to-head review, we had made a drive image with the most trusted name in the bunch: Ghost. Good thing, too.

Like its namesake, Norton Ghost appears not to exist. There’s no Ghost icon or Start menu entry, al-though there is a Ghost Boot Wizard. As the user’s guide explains in a roundabout way, you’ll have to make a boot disk or two to launch Ghost when you restart your PC.

Depending on the boot disks you make, Ghost can save and restore images via USB (Universal Serial Bus) or parallel direct transfer cables, a network, a bootable CD, and sundry removable storage drives. As with Drive Image, we had to locate a driver for our net-work cards in both PCs, although Ghost assigned drive letters to net-work drives automatically.

Ghost handily saved and restored almost every image we made, although it could only’ create a non-compressed local image on the 233MHz K6 system. It also bugged us for our license number with each restoration. One important tip: If you restore a partition on a multi-partition drive, don’t let Ghost set the restored partitions sue as the whole drive’s capacity, or you will overwrite all your partitions.

Put simply, Ghost saved the day when both the other utilities in this roundup failed us. Say what you want about its clunky operation; we would rather have a difficult tool that works than an easy tool that doesn’t.

Ghost 2002 offers image password protection, supports NTFS and Ext2 tile systems, and runs under Win98/ NT4/Me/2000/XP. A new version should be out by the time you read this.

Truelmage Deluxe has an awesome list of credentials, but is it a Ghost-buster? The utility scores on OS support, running under DOS, Win3.x through WinXP, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and others. It also supports Linux Ext2, Ext3, and ReiserFS file systems, as well as VSB and IEEE 1394 (also known as Fire-Wire) storage devices. Heck, it even created an image of our WinXP partition while WinXP was running. It can mount an image as a drive letter in Windows Explorer, permitting quick browsing afterward. A new version, due to be released about the time you read this, will add network support from within Windows.

TrueImage does have to reboot to a pre-OS GUI to restore a partition running the OS, which is understand-able. Unfortunately, partway through the restoration process from the second hard drive, the program announced that the image it had made and verified earlier was corrupted. We hadn’t made a rescue CD or diskettes this time around (OK, we ran out of blank media), so it was back to Norton Ghost to fix every-thing again. Sigh.

An Image Emerges
This month’s Smart Choice is, by process of elimination, Norton Ghost. It’s also the most difficult to use. However, it not only worked a high percentage of the time, but it also cleaned up messes the other two titles left behind.

Drive Image 2002 was our house of straw; TrueImage Deluxe was our house of sticks. We’ll stay in our breezy wolf-proof Norton Ghost brick house until the next versions of the others blow into town. If you decide to build in the high-risk drive-imaging neighborhood, make sure you do three things: Back up your files first, make rescue disks, and use a serial or PS/2 mouse. You may thank us for this advice later.