i recently installed a hotswap ata-raid system that accepts ide drives on my work system. i plan to use it to clone drives whenever i need to.... i am working with symantec ghost, which seems to only do the dirtywork in DOS. i'd love to be able to clone a hdd without leaving windows.... any apps that you guys recommend? before anyone says it, dd is an acceptible option only if i can control the resulting partition sizes, like what i can do in ghost right now.

xcopy [source] [destination] /c /h /e /k /r

Souce/destination can be something like c: or a directory. This will just copy the files from one drive/directory to another. If you are using Win9x, you will have to sys the drive afterwards to make it bootable.

Example:

xcopy c:\*.* d: /c /h /e /k /r

will copy all of drive C: to drive D:

Every time I try this type of copy I run into files that are open/inuse by Windows and the copy fails. Perhaps I wasn't using all those same switches.

Exactly. I wouldn't recommend using xcopy if you really need a clone of the drive, Ghost or something similar is a much better approach.

Ghost and things like it drop out of Windows to clone drives for the very reason that you can't copy certain files while Windows has them open.

btw, the system i got was this. i'm very happy with it.

yeah, xcopying doesnt copy over the mbr or any hidden ntfs streams. but i would imagine if windows relinquished control of the hard drives in question, then it can get a perfect copy easily. just need to find an app that doesnt run on the windows software layer.

Yeah, the switches are what will prevent xcopy from failing when it tries to copy the pagefile, etc.

I can't even remeber what all them do. I just remember the word 'checker' to remeber which ones you need.

Yeah, xcopy will just copy all the files off a drive.

I was going to post a question related to this, but I'll do it here instead of a new thread...

My second WD drive is dying (2 in 2 years), and I need to get a new one going before it dies totally. It's doing that clicking noise every so often now. There's way too much data to try to archive then restore on a new drive.
If I do an xcopy as Rob posted, can I then boot to that copied disk and continue as if it were the original drive that is dying, or is there more to it than that? What I'd like to do is copy it, then boot to the new one and send the dying/dead one in for warranty replacement. Also I am assuming xcopy is a DOS command, correct? Thanks...

If you are using Win9x, you can use xcopy (yes, it is run from a command prompt within windows) then do 'sys c: d:' to transfer the boot record. I am not sure about NT-based Windows though.

On NT-based Windows, you'll need to use DriveCopy or Ghost.

Agreed. On any Microsoft product, it's probably best to use Ghost 6.5 or 7.x. If you are "cloning" a raid config, it's best to use DriveCopy.

well, looks like Drive Image 7 from Powerquest supports cloning without leaving Windows, so I'm going to try it out. Seems like it achieves this using sector to sector copies. Hopefully, it achieves what i'm trying to do. thanks for pointing me to DriveCopy.... wouldnt have found DriveImage without it.