[BBLISA] Win XP Backup software?

[Edward Ned Harvey]

To "shrink" your hard drive onto a smaller one, there are several things
you'll have to bear in mind, some of which are less obvious than others --

First, the obvious problem of "partition doesn't fit."  You can solve this
problem using any of several tools -- Best would be Ghost, which will do a
Partition --> Partition copy and resize on the fly.  You could alternatively
shrink the partition first and then use dd, but this is trickier and not
quite as reliable.  (See
http://www.linuxmigration.com/quickref/install/disk.html#ntfs) 

The 2nd problem (less obvious) is the master boot record.  The Microsoft
version of MBR searches for first active primary nonhidden partition, and
boots it.  You can set this using fdisk /mbr from any standard Microsoft
bootdisk.

The 3rd problem (even less obvious) is the BOOT.INI file.  This file guides
the windows boot process by specifying the partition # that it should boot
from.  Therefore, if you change your partition scheme from one machine to
the next, you will have to edit this file.  It's best if your new machine
has similar or same partitioning scheme as the original machine.  That is,
if you have been booting the 1st and only partition thus far, make sure your
new computer also has only one partition.  And so on.


-----Original Message-----
From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On Behalf
Of Carl Alexander
Sent: Saturday, June 25, 2005 11:12 PM
To: BBLISa at nedharvey.com
Cc: 'BBLISA'
Subject: Re: [BBLISA] Win XP Backup software?


> I am looking for a free alternative to Ghost, that handles NTFS.  Of 
> course, incremental backups would be an awesome bonus.
>  
> Any suggestions?
>  
> Personal experience, please.....
>  
> (I see tons of things available, but I don't want to try them all.  I 
> want to start with a few personal suggestions, and only try a few.)

I have a related question but (I think) not the same one.  I'm new to
Windows (well, using it again for the first time after 16 years as a Mac and
Unix geek).  I have a Windows XP system that I want to swap disks in.  My
one odd requirement is I want to swap in a _smaller_ disk.  (It's only using
about 12GB of disk, and will never, ever need more than 2x that; I have a
spare 40GB drive and a useful place to put the 250GB drive that's in the XP
machine.)  Windows users I've spoken too seem to think doing this would
require either black magic or some commercial software. Is this really that
hard?

---Alex

_______________________________________________
bblisa mailing list
bblisa at bblisa.org
http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa