The Drive to Drive Transfer
July 25th, 2010The replacement hard drive arrives in the mail. It’s warm as it has been baking on my front doorstep for several hours. After spending an hour getting past the POST 21 error messages, it’s time to copy the contents of the failing hard-drive to the good one.
I know one of the commercial programs that does the job is Norton Ghost; however, there is a free software program called G4L (Ghost for Linux) that will also get the job done. Presumably ghosting means to duplicate. After creating a bootable CD image of the program, I plugged in the bad hard-drive and its replacement and started the computer up.
You’re presented with a text-based menu system. I choose option 1 which requires typing g4l and pressing enter.
At the main menu there is a raw drive copy mode.
Within this mode there is an Click ‘n Clone option to perform a drive to drive transfer.
Unfortunately it’s not apparent which drive has my data on it. It would be a very bad thing to copy the contents of a blank drive and to my failing hard drive. That would overwrite all of my personal data.
Fortunately there is a toggle partitions option that will shed more light on the drive details. In hind-sight I should have enabled the power off option from this menu.
The source/target drive options now show more details about each hard drive. I see that block device (hard drive) sda has two Windows (NTFS) partitions on it and device sdb is the blank drive. So in my situation device sda is the source drive and sdb is the target.
After some confirmation/warning screens, the cloning process commences. Cloning one terabyte of data is an over-night job.
I wake up the next morning, unplug the failing hard-drive and remove the G4L CD. Windows starts right up with all of my personal data and programs intact.