external hard drive

[Joe van Raamt]

Is it difficult to set these up or can they just be plugged in to the USB connection. (futureshop.ca has an 320 gb on sale for $100) I like to back up my regular internal HD after noting that many HD's fail.

[John Sutherland_1]

I think an external hard drive is just the greatest. Mine is a Maxtor, combined with Acronis True Image, I can update my backup in a few minutes every week or so. If I format my hard drive, I can download from the backup and be back in operation in less than a half hour. Otherwise it would be days reloading programs and getting back to where I lost all.
It should be very easy, however I had a problem with my windows program and I had to repair that before the external would work normally.
John

[Joe van Raamt]

Hi John, does Acronis True Image require a boot disk?

[Hugo Tigre]

hi joe,

A free alternative is driver snapshot

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

I've used this in the past and works great.

You can backup the entire OS if you want, but to restore it you will need a boot disk of course.

hope this helps,

regards,
hugo tigre

[Joe van Raamt]

Hi Hugo,
I have Norton Partition Magic 8.0 can I partition this EHHD first? My pc HHD has three partitions, will they be tranferred to the EHDD or will they be erased?

[Hugo Tigre]

i don't know if I understand what you want to do exactly, but you can make an image of the external Hard-drive and also of the internal hard-drive.

You can also choose if you want to do an image of only one partition or of the entire drive.

regards,
hugo tigre.

[Joe van Raamt]

I want to copy/back up the pc hard drive on to the external one. The pc HDD drive is partitioned in three. 1) should/can I partition the external drive. 2) will the clone loose the partitions or should I attempt to clone each partition from the pc separately

[Hugo Tigre]

ho,

if you backup to an image the entire drive, then when you restore it, it will delete the target drive and create the same structure as your original drive.

The best way for you to be sure, is to backup the entire drive, and then restore it to another drive just to test it, you can still keep the image as a backup. Off course the entire information of that drive will be replaced by the image content, which includes the partitions.

hope this helps,
hugo tigre

[John Sutherland_1]

You need some image software in order to place your entire hard drive in the external backup. Then you can replace your entire hard drive or pick certain select elements.
No need of another disk backup.
If you format your computer hard drive?
Restart Windows
Install your image software
Download from your external hard drive
You are back in business.
I have found sometimes some programs may need to be re installed, but aggravation is minimal
John

[Joe van Raamt]

John and Hugo,
the external hard drive is formatted for nfts and shows in my computer as drive H. I do have Norton Partion magic 8.0, but when I tried (2 years ago or so)to partion my pc hard drive I screwed up and had to take it to a shop to fix. They made three partitions for me. I also have Norton ghost 2003, but when I tried to use that,the operation failed. I might just copy and paste the files I want to save and not worry about the OS and its programs.
I guess I am a sucker for buying programs to try and end up not being able to use.
Thanks a lot anyway.

[John Sutherland_1]

Norton ghost should have worked.
You can go to Norton ghost and download a trial copy good for thirty days. should be long enough to work out the bugs..I personally had a windows file missing and had to repair this. If you can open your backup and transfer to it this should not be your problem. I could not get my Maxtor backup to respond and had to use a third party software.

good luck, somtimes the effort is worth it.

[Hugo Tigre]

hi again joe,

before you give up, just try the free software i recommended to you before.

It's really easy to work with, you will also find documentation for it, on their site. an the only thing you will need additionally is a boot disk or cd for when you want to restore the image.

You can find many of this boot cd's on the net.

if you have a hard-drive withought important information, you can use it to test this scenario.

backing up the c drive to an image doesn't do any harm to the drive or windows, and you can try and restore it to the external.

best of luck to you,
hugo tigre

[Joe van Raamt]

Hi John,
I do have Norton Ghost 2003, but it too difficult for me to grasp the instructions.--- Hi Hugo, I did use the snapshot.exe, but how can I check what is on the ext.drive like if I want to view it from another pc. (See pic) or should I have used the setup.exe Sorry for asking these seeminly simple answerable questions

[Hugo Tigre · Accepted solution]

no problem joe,

check out this link:

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/intro.htm

regards,
hugo tigre