Yet another PC died on me, and it was the hard disk this time.

Started to go through my spare PCs and found another hard disk had died, maybe they don't like being stored in a cold damp tin shed.

So this has got me wondering about creating hard disk images so I can just write the image to another drive and away I go again.

BUT here's the thing, I want to avoid doing the imaging on my Mach3 computer. I tend to strip XP down to the bone and disable all sorts of services, and I don't want to install any other software.

So is it possible to temporarilly remove the hardrive from the Mach3 PC and install it as a slave drive in my "imaging PC". Then I create the disk image, save it to file, then put the hard drive back in the Mach3 PC.

Likewise if I need to replace the Mach3 hard drive, I put a new drive in my "imaging PC" (as a slave drive), write the image to it, then put it in the Mach3 PC.

Feasible ?

Keith.

Sounds good to me. 

I use an external HD to perform exactly this same task.

Tweakie.

Thanks very much Tweakie, good to know.

Keith.

There are some OS that will not let you change the hard drive to another PC without reregistering the OS to the new hardware.

Just a thought, (;-) TP

using a live linux cd like gparted works great for cloning drives...... it will make an exact duplicate.... one downside is you have to copy to the same size drive or bigger. it will run from the cd and nothing gets installed on the drive. it copys raw data so it doesn't matter what operating system you are copying.

There are some OS that will not let you change the hard drive to another PC without reregistering the OS to the new hardware.

Just a thought, (;-) TP

Cheers Terry,

don't suppose you know off the top of your head if XP is one of those. I'd be happy to dedicated one of my old PCs to just this job.

Keith.

using a live linux cd like gparted works great for cloning drives...... it will make an exact duplicate.... one downside is you have to copy to the same size drive or bigger. it will run from the cd and nothing gets installed on the drive. it copys raw data so it doesn't matter what operating system you are copying.

Thanks Patton,

that's an interesting one but it might be a bit expensive LOL. I'm mainly interested in imaging because I can store all the images of all drives in one place.

BUT that gparted could also be useful to clone just one PCs hard drive, the one in current use. That way I'll be back in action in a heartbeat if a replacement drive is ready to swap out.

Keith.

Hi Beefy

For disk cloning I use LSoft Active@ Boot disk creator. From this you can create a boot CD/DVD or a bootable USB flash drive. At it's core it uses the windows preinstall environment which is basically a very stripped down version of Win 7.

simply go into the BIOS and set your machine to boot from your CD/DVD or flash drive and reboot, active@  will create a RAMDisk in memory and loads itself into there. it does not need to write any files to your hard drive at all.

you can either connect your target drive internally or use a USB Drive dock as I do. The clone function will create a complete clone of your source drive, MBR, Boot sector and all.

A couple of caveats though,

It is a very powerful tool capable of much more than cloning disks, so read the manual very carefully.

It is probably a good idea to disconnect your CNC machine from the P.C. whilst doing a clone just in case something untoward should happen.

It will not work on very old machines, but if your machine can support Mach 3 it will almost certainly support Active@

Acronis Software  is an option you may want to consider.

RICH

Thanks very much guys, I'll check them out.

Keith.