I swear I’ve seen this topic discussed before, but the search is borked so I’m burdening you all with my ignorance
My fiancee’s old laptop has outlived its usefulness, and as such is about to be turned into my own personal playground, bless her generosity. She has some things on there she wanted to keep but didn’t want to be bothered going through finding every little thing and moving it to external media. So I’ve mirrored the hard drive for her onto my external…I think.
Her laptop is an old Dell Inspirion 2650, and my external HD is some kind of Western Digital rectangle. I’ve used DriveImage XML to make a mirror image of her hard drive on my external. Now here’s the problem – the external is no longer showing up in the Explore thinger. This being the case, I have no idea if the mirroring was actually successful or not. How do I access the info stored on my external to make sure I got everything from the laptop? I know that if it worked, I should be able to boot from the external, but I’m hoping there’s another way so that the stuff on there is easily accessible for Lady Soul.
And while I’m at it, my ultimate plan is as follows: once every last teeny bit of information is safely mirrored from her laptop, I’m going to format it and install Linux and teach myself how to play around in it. Which version of Linux would you recommend to the novice user? I’ve heard varying reports of Ubuntu and Gnome being the easiest to start with.
Eventually, once I’ve satisfied myself with very basic proficiency in Linux-based screwing around, I’m going to tear that sucker open and teach myself to solder. Fun!
By “mirroring” a drive do you mean you created a clone of the drive so that you could conceivably transfer the mirrored image to an identical laptop and the laptop would boot? If so, the process is also called ghosting an image.
Or did you backup the hard drive, which means to copy the entire contents of a hard drive verbatim to another hard drive? If this is the case, more often than not you cannot copy the contents back to an identical laptop and it will boot.
You may not think understanding the nomenclature is important. However, without understanding what you actually did, considering the software you used allows you to mirror/clone/ghost a drive as well as backup a drive, it may be very important.
So did you mirror/clone/ghost the drive? Or did you backup the drive?
Right-click My Computer and hit Manage.
In the left pane expand Storage and click on Disk Management.
If the external drive shows up in the right pane, right-click it and hit Change Drive Letter and Paths. See if changing it to a different letter helps.
If the drive doesn’t show up, try disconnecting and reconnecting it to a different port. Right-click Disk Management in the left pane and hit Rescan Disks. If it still doesn’t show up then you may have a hardware problem.
I’m not a Linux expert, but Ubuntu is the distribution I’d go with. It has a fairly intuitive interface and it’s very popular right now so it should be easy to find answers to questions that you might have.
And personally I wouldn’t say “ghost” unless I were using Symantec/Norton Ghost. People do use the term generically, but “image” is better.
Yes, I mean mirroring in its literal, technical sense. It was not a simple backup; I created an XML image using DriveImage XML’s Volume Shadow Services function. I did this because she wants the option of restoring the laptop to its current state (this applies only until I buy my soldering iron!), and I’m operating under the assumption that a mirror will accomplish that goal more effectively than a backup.
If it helps, the exact steps I took were as follows:
Open DriveImage XML
Select “Drive to Drive”
Select the laptop’s internal hard drive as the “One drive to copy to another drive”
In “Hot Imaging Strategy,” selected “Try Volume Shadow Services first,” as Volume Locking was giving me an error message that I can’t recall.
Selected the external hard drive as the drive to copy to.
Let the program do its work. The process took about ten hours. The laptop is unaltered, and the external hard drive no longer shows up on Explore directory.
Now, I believe that process should have created a mirror in the form of an XML image. If I’m mistaken in that assumption, then I’ve likely overestimated my level of knowledge on this subject, and will accept my flogging with a side of chastising to taste
Sorry for the double post, missed the edit window (I sure am good at that).
Disk Management shows the C: drive and an unlabeled drive (EISA Configuration, the “for god’s sake don’t mess with me” partition I’m assuming – I’ve never been in this window before). No other drives show up, regardless of which USB port I use, how many times I hit Rescan Disks, or the age of the lamb I sacrifice.
Well, if it’s indeed a hardware problem, at least it’s with this old external. I’ve been aching for a new one anyway!
Install Drive Image XML on another computer. Connect external drive to it. See if you can get at the files inside. Honestly, you should never want to connect the drive to the laptop again; if your fiancee needs a file, you can just hook the drive to her new computer.
That would be awesome if it actually did just die, instead of waiting until the day after you wiped the laptop.
No, what you describe isn’t mirroring, it is cloning.
Mirroring is an ongoing process, not a one-time action. It is when the system is set up so that everything written to the hard drive is also copied (mirrored) onto a second hard disk. It’s a simple form of RAID.
Cloning is a one-time action, where you make a complete copy of everything on a hard disk onto another hard disk.
I always thought there was a difference between making a one-time clone and an ongoing mirror, but that the term “mirror” could refer to either one. Looks like I was wrong on that one – thanks, t-bonham, ignorance fought! And my sincere apologies for whatever troubles my misuse of the word may have caused.
Installing DriveImageXML on my desktop does not allow me to get at the files in the external either. Interestingly, going to My Computer > Manage > Disk Management on the desktop shows the external in a way. It displays as an unlettered drive in the lower right hand frame (with the graphical representations of disk space usage), but I can’t manage to do anything with it, and I’m still unable to get at any useful information. It shows the hard drive as having a single, “unallocated” partition on it sized at 111.79 gigs. The external is a 120gb storage device, and cloning the laptop onto it should have taken up about 20 gigs of space. Is this cause for worry?
Thanks for all the help, guys. Sorry this is being a bit of a beast!
If the drive shows up there then it is probably ok physically. It sounds like something went wrong while creating the image and it wiped out the partitions without creating a new one.
I’d take another shot at imaging the laptop drive.
