cloning a PC

If they are really identical, you could try a pair of live CD/DVD/USB stick Linuxes, copying the raw drive files over the network.

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-TV

I use an old version of the Norton "Ghost" disk-imaging tool for this sort of thing. It boots directly from a CD (runs under DOS ) and I configure it to image the drive to a network share (I could also use USB drive). Once the image is created, I restore it to the other machine(s). I generally keep the image afterwards since it provides a quick fall-back to restore a machine to a known-good state.

[N.B. There are other tools that do similar disk-imaging, I just use Ghost because it's what I have. :-)]

be seeing you .. Don

Well, if you compare the speed of this, even with 100 MB Ethernet, to doing it on a local disk, you won't be happy. Of course, if you can let it chug away overnight, then it is probably OK.

To do this with a Linux OS, you use the dd command, and you get an identical, block by block copy, from the partition table on down.

Otherwise, I'd use one of those USB SATA disk docks. You can clone a mid- sized drive in under an hour. That might not work so well on a RAID setup, though.

I have cloned Linux OS'es while the main server was running normal work. I doubt you can do that on a Windows system.

Jon

What would it trash the setup? We have the same setup with RAID1. We just hot swap one of the drive for off-site backup. The box would automatically rebuild the newly installed drive. We have duplicated boxes that way easily.

Unless your drives cannot be hot swapped, then you are really losing one big advantage of RAID.

That soungs good. I could clone to a USB drive and keep that forever. I hope the new Ghost is as good as the old one.

Remember to use SYSPREP, or else you will have so much hassle that the money saved will not compensate for it.

I do this quite often and have developed a conservative philosophy intended to allow me to go back to a previous condition[1]. Roughly in order:

1. Run Belarc Advisor on each machine and print the results. What you want are the Win 7 serial numbers. MS activation is tied to the machine (OS serial number, CPU serial number, HD serial number, etc). That means if you clone the drive and put it in a different machine, MS will probably ask for the activation key again. This usually happens with OEM built machines, but not with retail Win 7 packages. Better safe than sorry, so get the serial numbers in print. (Note: The serial number label on the machine will probably NOT be the same as the serial number used to install Win 7).
2. Find a USB 3.0 backup drive sufficient to hold backup images from all 3 machines. I use Acronis True Image 2015 for such image backups. If you screw up somewhere, you can use the image to put things back. The usual mistake is to overwrite a file on the target machine that you needed. With USB 3.0, you should be able to do image backups at about 3 GBytes/minute. In the past, my problems were mostly dealing with UEFI BIOS's. Make sure whatever you use supports UEFI boot from CD. Most don't due to the UEFI Secure Boot feature.
3. Use the same software to restore the image to machines 2 and 3.
4. Verify that 2 and 3 are activated. If not, right click on "My Computah" icon -> Properties and change the serial number to whatever it was before you overscribbled it. You may need to activate it any, which should work.

Good luck.

[1] With computahs, don't do anything that you can't undo. For Win 10 upgrades, I first do an image backup of the original machine.

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I do that now with hot-plug RAID. When I plug a new drive into a PC, the raid controller knows that it's new and copies onto it.

In a non-hot plug case, how does the controlled know which drive to copy onto the other?

Clonezilla.

Yes, that question came up too. I guess the safest way is to completely wipe clean the new drive before swapping in. The controller should be storing some configuration data on the drive, perhaps the beginning sectors?

If you're going this route check out Drive Snapshot as an alternative to Ghost. I use it to do daily back ups of windows machines to a network drive by running a cmd script with the windows task scheduler.

It's easy to browse a particular backup since they can be mounted as a network drive from any PC running snapshot.

It's easy to clone a PC's from a backup - I boot from Hirens BootCD, run snapshot, select the backup and restore to the new disk.

I've run the HDD manufacturer's migration software (eg. Samsung for SSDs) and 'Migrate Easy' many times to clone laptop computer drives. Usually the first thing I do with a new laptop so the machine can be restored to pristine for whatever reason (return to manufacturer, crossing borders with out of control customs people).

Seldom tried putting the drive in a *different* machine though, that would (IIRC) result in a few required fixes, but would eventually work.

Windows is pretty robust about getting itself working again when it's been partially trashed.

--sp

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Den torsdag den 27. august 2015 kl. 19.17.52 UTC+2 skrev John Larkin:

looks like win7 comes with all the tools needed

-Lasse

Boot linux and dd the disk over netcat.

On Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:37:03 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

Note, John... THIS is the EXACT right way to do what you want.

Get a USB HD adapter for SATA or whatever the HD uses.

Boot up an ordinary Ubuntu Live CD or even an Ubuntu Studio Live DVD and attach the drive afterward.

The machine's drive will be /dev/sda and the newly attached drive for cloning will be /dev/sdb

The command you enter in a "CLI" using sudo for super user access will be "dd".

The string is "if" or "input file", "of" or "output file" and "bs" or "block size". of which MB is a good choice.

So as follows:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=2MB

It depends of the size of the drives for how long it takes but it will copy every sector.

IF your machines have USB3 chipset level ports, a USB 3 hard drive interface device will yield faster results.

After making a clone...

Then start the machine with the cloned drive and wait till MS "notices" that you have made a hardware change and wants you to "re-activate" your machine's OS installation. You can click on that link at that time and enter the new key, OR...

Then, under a right click/properties selection from the task bar on the "computer" icon, you will find an "activate Windows now" link. Clicking that will allow you to enter a new license key.

So clone all the drives with one (make sure you have ran update on that machine first, which could take as much as 700+ MB of updating to complete), and then add them all to the new machines and the OS will 'notice' the hardware change on each and ask to re-activate each.

On Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:32:30 +0100, Tim Watts Gave us:

OK... my way works to.

How about this:

Doesnt support software for hardware(Fake) RAID.

Cheers