Cloning a disk

[mubs]

Folks,

I need to replace a failing HDD. This is not the system drive, but drive 2. However, both drives are very old, and I'd like to make the newer drive going in there the system drive. Once this is up and running, I will make the previous system drive the new data drive and junk the data drive.

Both old drives are WD. I downloaded Acronis WD edition from WD's website, but it didn't play nice.

What's the best sw currently for cloning a hard drive, including MBR, boot sector etc. ? Since this is a one time affair, something free would be best. Thanks!

 

[Mercutio]

I think the WD/Seagate/Maxtor editions of TrueImage are pretty old, like maybe the 2008 versions?
It's definitely my buddy for that, but CloneZilla is freeware and will definitely clone a drive for you.
You could also use a Linux boot CD and just run dd on the drives.

If that's a PITA, let me know and I'll hook you up with something.

 

[Bozo]

Macrium Reflect is free and will do want you want.

 

[mubs]

To clarify:

Boot drive is an 80GB WD
Data drive is a 120GB WD. This is dying.

Both are PATA drives. Since I don't have any spare PATA drives, I have to use a spare 250GB SATA drive. I do have a PCI SATA controller with 2 ports lying around.

My intention is to clone the 80 GB system drive to the SATA since it is much faster, and to use the now free 80GB to replace the dying 120GB. Able to boot from the SATA drive/controller combo without problems.

The kink is that the 80GB has W98 and WXP dual booting on it with BootMagic (came with Partition Magic 8 a millenium ago). Eveything works even now on the 80GB; on boot, get the option to pick, and each OS works perfectly.

Used EaseUS Partition Master Home Free for cloning. Seems to do the job, but on cloning, something gets muched. On booting from the cloned disk, get a text msg at the top of the screen that says Bootmagic is corrupt, press any key to continue. Pressing a key boots into WXP (the timeout default in BootMagic is WXP). I set the W98 partition active and tried booting from it, but the system just hangs after pressing a key at the Bootmagic text msg.

Can W98 work on a 250GB drive? It is the first partition, and is only 2.5GB large.

I could just give up and clone the 120 and be done with it. But I have sweated to get this set up. The W98 install runs a virtual CD rom drive, and there are images of about 50 kid's learning CDs on the two hard disks. Launching a game loads an image of the appropriate image of the CD into the vitrual CD-rom drive and runs the program. I did this for my daughter around 2004. She's outgrown them now, but my wife's neice is 5 and this will make a good hand-me-down in a few months when I am planning a new build for my daughter. Incidentally, this is a hand-me-down to us as well; a Dell Dimension 4400 that is still going strong! Making a SATA drive the system drive will keep it running a bit longer.

Downloading CloneZilla now.

Will also check out Macrium.

Thanks Merc & Bozo.

I realize the two drives are of different sizes, but all I'm asking is that a faithul clone be made! I don't think that's too much to ask, notwithstanding the difference in size.

 

[Chewy509]

Re: SATA card.
Does the card have a BIOS that is bootable (supports hooking int 13h for boot services)? (Cheaper SATA cards don't have the right software to support booting from them).
Does the Dell BIOS support booting from external cards? (It should, but you never know).

Also to go from IDE to SATA, will require a lot of fiddling with WinXP prior or will require a reinstallation of Windows XP. Windows 98, should boot fine though, but I have no idea if there are Win98 drivers for the SATA card...

 

[mubs]

Chewy, the card is bootable; I have booted into WXP from it after cloning. It is W98 that won't boot.

I installed the driver for the SATA card into W98 and WXP before cloning, so not a problem there. It is the multi-boot aspect that's getting screwed up.

The CloneZilla ISO images don't seem to be bootable :blue:

 

[mubs]

At a dead end. The Clonezilla ISOs are not bootable! Why? I tried a couple of different versions.

The Macrium sw is to be run from Windows. During install, it says error occurred and aborts the install

Tried Acronis WD Ed again; W98 not bootable. Same with EaseUS sw.

Searched all day; there are many uni/multicasting progs, not suitable for local disk to local disk cloning.

Sheesh, doesn't ANYBODY make a simple CD ISO that plain and simple clones from one disk to another exactly? I understand there are differences in geometry, etc., but it's not like one of these is an Advanced Format disk.

Searching through my stuff, found an old copy of DriveImage 2002 (IIRC the last version released) on two floppies. Trying that now.

What's worse is that the 80 GB system drive is now getting SMART read errors. They're both old, and I'm trying to put everything on this one SATA disk that's large enough.

 

[Mercutio]

Every tech should have a copy of Hiren's BootCD. Not that I am in any way advocating searching for such a thing in the monstrous and illegal Proteus version that includes a crap-ton of clearly illegal licensed software on Piratebay.se. Did I mention that it would be illegal and wrong? Because it clearly would be those things and nonetheless there are currently 49 seeders and 4 leechers so the download of such a clearly wrong and illegal thing would be very fast and completely solve all of your problems. Not that you would do such a thing.

 

[mubs]

Of course I wouldn't do such things!

But which tool are you referring to?

 

[Mercutio]

Well the whole point of Hiren's Boot CD (Proteus Restored Edition) is that it has pretty much all of them.
I do believe the current release has TrueImage 2012 on it, along with current releases of Ghost, DriveImage and HDClone.

 

[ddrueding]

127 seeders and 17 leechers for version 15.2 (mid-January).

Of course, you wouldn't think of downloading it, but the swarm speed is pretty good right now.

 

[mubs]

I tried with Easus Disk Copy (I guess it's the Disk/Partition copy portion of their Partition Master). The downloaded program only only allows creation of an ISO to be used stand-alone, which is what I wanted. No dice, nothing boots.

It appears that either BootMagic and/or Win98 is unable to see / use the SATA controller. The controller mfr does not have a W98 driver on their website of driver CD< but I found something on the web. Guess it's no good. I don't think it's the tools.

I've already spent way too much time on this. I guess I'm going to have to scrap the W98 part of it. At this time, it's more important to get WXP up and running.

Later, when I build a new system for my daughter, I'll either install W98 (by itself, no dual boot) on this machine, or if that doesn't work, I'll have to try the VM route. If even that fails, the whole game thingy has to be kissed goodbye; they're all terribly old anyway. They're good, though; gave my daughter a headstart in her language, reasoning and math skills. She was selected for the GATE (Gifted & Talented Education) program for 4th grade at school in California. Not saying it was solely because of the games, but they certainly helped.

Thanks everybody!

 

[Mercutio]

As an alternative, you could install Windows 98 as a VM on a more powerful Android/ARM-based system, to give your daughter the benefit of a platform modern enough to be useful for internet access while maintaining her ability to use whatever old software you need.

Also, congratulations to your daughter. I'm a little surprised you'd want to have her receive primary or secondary schooling in the US, given all the political bullshit (e.g. Texas essentially dictating what goes in our textbooks nationwide) that's built into our education system.

 

[mubs]

Thanks Merc.

Daughter's well past the age of using this stuff; she used it when she was five-ish on till she was about 10. She's close to 17 now. She uses the XP part for doing homework, researching projects, and of course, email, chat and iTunes. The idea was to hand this machine off to my wife's niece who's 5. I don't see a way other than to use a VM now. W98 probably won't even install on modern hw.

Daughter studied in CA till 4th grade, since then it's been here. Primary education in CA is very good. Or I should say was. Budget cuts have wreaked havoc. My niece who was born and raised in CA became a teacher since she loves kids and teaching. She is told to buy supplies and bring them to school - out of her pocket. That is sad.

With all this sequestration BS going on now, public services are hit. But governments all over the world are the same; the more money you give them, the more they will spend, more foolishly.

 

[Mercutio]

Windows 98 will install on modern hardware. Leave SATA ports in IDE mode, make sure the drives aren't too big. You only need 512MB RAM since that's the most it will use, and you'd have to do some hunting to find a compatible graphics card. My "retro gaming" rig is a Core 2 Duo E6300 on LGA775 with a Radeon 9800 and a 21" 1600x1200 LCD. It works shockingly well and that same machine would be perfectly happy with Windows 8 on it. At some point I'll swap in an 80GB SSD, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

[ddrueding]

I can only imagine the boot time on that with an ssd and W98...

 

[Bozo]

Instead of trying to clone the disk to another disk, make an image of the old disk and install it on the new disk. I have had much better luck with imaging than cloning.

 

[mubs]

1) Windows 98 will install on modern hardware.
2) Leave SATA ports in IDE mode, make sure the drives aren't too big.
3) You'd have to do some hunting to find a compatible graphics card.

1) What about chipset drivers and such?
2) How??!!
3) What kind? PCI-E cards won't have W98 drivers. Modern hw won't have AGP slots. PCI ( and AGP) cards are hard to find.

Instead of trying to clone the disk to another disk, make an image of the old disk and install it on the new disk. I have had much better luck with imaging than cloning.

I thought of this, Bozo. But in my experience, many tools don't include the MBR / boot sectors whey they image. My logic was that intuitively, disk cloning ought to be more perfect that image & restore.

Thanks.

 

[Mercutio]

1) What about chipset drivers and such?
2) How??!!
3) What kind? PCI-E cards won't have W98 drivers. Modern hw won't have AGP slots. PCI ( and AGP) cards are hard to find.

1. Anything that has a WDM-mode driver should install on Windows 98. Intel 875p boards aren't super-new, but they support Core 2 Duo, DDR2 and PCIe and definitely have Windows 98 support.
2. Drives probably need to be smaller than 500GB and addressed in IDE mode. I tried a 750GB drive (partitioned and formatted on XP) and found that Windows 98 didn't like it, but it didn't mind 400 or 250GB drives. If you're going to partition using fdisk, be aware that the largest drive it will represent is 128GB. You can still partition a larger drive, you just have to tell it to use 100% of the drive for the partition.
3. The last cards to have official Windows 98 support are the Radeon 9x00 series and the nVidia Geforce 6x00 series. Those cards were sold as both AGP and PCIe. You could also use a 3dfx Voodoo 3000 or 4000 and get a damned good card for Windows 98-era stuff.

Unofficially, the Omega Drivers guys maintained Windows 98 drivers for quite a while after ATI and nVidia stopped. They still have an a Windows 98 download up on their site.

 

[mubs]

Thanks Merc, that's helpful.