New and Confused...
I'll try and keep this short. I ran the disc clone software through windows XP, I now realize I should have used the boot disc method; anyways I eventually got my old drive copied over to my new drive. Old drive in the original spot, new drive added to an open sata connection. Everything appears to be ok with the new drive, everything’s cloned ok, but the drive letters are something other than C & F (like my original)
If I understand correctly I can't just unplug my old drive and swap in the new drive and expect it's going to work. Can I re-do the whole process again, or is there some method that will correctly label the drive to C & F like my original? I would eventually like to keep my old hard drive in the computer as the backup. Hopefully it's not too late to correct and I don't mind starting over if that's an option. I spent a couple of hours reading and looking for solutions, but I probably missed it somewhere.
Any advice, and thanks in advance...
Ok, I remember that when it finished it did shut down. I started it back up because I wanted to make sure the basic system was still ok...it was. That's when I noticed the new drive had 2 partitions with the same amount of data occupying it as the old one but with different drive letters. If I disconnect my old one and leave the new one hooked up do I do it with the boot-up disc or just start up as normal and windows will find the new HDD and change it to "C"? and probably 'F" like my old one.
The TI boot disk is out of the picture now - it just provides a Linux OS environment in order to run TI.
Try disconnecting the old and booting with only the new one. It if doesn't work, reconnect the old one and try the clone again but remember to disconnect the old one before the first boot. If that doesn't work, ie, the C drive is not C, then hopefully one of the booting/drive letter experts will jump in.
Ok thanks for your advice. I'll give that a try as soon as I get home. I'll post my results one way or the other.
I tried it and it worked...thanks. I now have my new drive showing as the "C" drive, which is what I wanted. I plugged my old one back in and it assigned it G & H (2 partitions) which is what I wanted also. My original intention was to have a bigger and newer hard drive and use my older one for the backup. Am I better off leaving the old drive plugged in or unplugged (it's easy to get at) and doing weekly backups or clones - not sure what method is better. My fear is to be able to plug a HDD in, incase of a hardrive failure or virus. I'm not sure, but it seems with both drives plugged in the system seems slower, maybe it's my imagination. Everything seems to work ok. Would I now want to backup or clone my new drive to the old one once I feel comfortable that everything works ok?
If you want to be "good" at doing backups, the system should be configured in such a way that they are easy to do. If you say that you have to shut it down and change something first then the odds are you'll be less likely to do it.
I always run with a second HD connected internally for backups. I also make images, not clones, which allows me to keep a history of backups in case something went wrong and wasn't immediately noticed. If you make a clone to the second HD then that is all you have other than the original and if something is screwed up the clone is screwed up with the same problem. You can only have 1 clone on the HD and thus it isn't a good use of the space. However, some people like to have a clone because it is likely faster to switch over in case of a disk failure.
My recommendation and that's all it is since there is more than one way to skin the cat:
Make images to your second internal drive. At suitable intervals copy a current image to an external USB drive as a second level backup. I never bother with DVDs.
If you've never made and restored an image before:
Make the image of your C drive and store it on the second partition of the same physical drive using either Windows or by booting up the TI rescue CD. Windows is likely faster but some people prefer to use the CD since Windows is not running and the HD is static. I always do them in Windows. I always validate the image as well.
Assuming you have either a spare HD or no longer have need for the info on your "old" HD you cloned. Restore the image to this drive and if successful, make this drive the boot drive and boot up the system. This is the best way to confirm that TI works restoring an image. It is essential that you do this at least once because the TI rescue environment which is needed to restore C is Linux and there may be driver problems. A spare disk is used in case the process fails since the target disk will have its partition deleted.
If you don't want to do the above, then the next best test is to boot up the TI CD.
Create an archive using it and then validate the archive using the TI boot CD. This will demonstrate that TI can boot up the CD, find your HD and create an archive and the archive can be read into RAM and its numerous checksums can be calculated and compare properly with the ones stored in the archive.
Not as good as doing the complete restore but pretty good.
After you have confirmed TI works properly then it should continue to work properly unless you have a hardware failure or a major hardware change. Most people who have restore problems come unstuck because they've never tested the Linux restore environment. They create and validate in Windows and think all is well (and why not) but Windows isn't what is running when the active partition, typically C, needs to be restored.
Hope this is clear.