Backing up and restoring active windows drive

khankhan New
edited December 2006 in Hardware
Trying to use partition magic recently to create a partition on a new drive. I have 2x 200 gb IDE drives and 2x 250 gb SATA drives. The first of the IDE drives is the one I am having problems with. It is my windows drive, and is divided into a 2 gb swap, 120 gb windows/applications drive, and a 60 gb storage drive that was made with the unallocated space. I know this is completely retarded, but I didn't realize there was unallocated space until now, when I got this error, so PM won't fix it.

The error says:

"Disk 1 appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry (254 h 63s). This serious problem can lead to data loss."

And then it tells me to back it up, reformat, and restore the backup. The problem is, this is my active windows drive. Is there any way to do the backup of an active windows drive, reformat, restore, and then reboot? Perhaps using a linux live CD or something else?

Any guidance appreciated.

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    If you want to image the Windows drive, so that you can just install the hard drive and have the OS and all other programs on the drive work right off the bat, you will need to image it or clone it using Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. I have used both those backup programs and they work perfectly. Neither of them are freeware. If you just want to back up data, then Cobian works great, and it is freeware.
  • khankhan New
    edited December 2006
    Leonardo wrote:
    If you want to image the Windows drive, so that you can just install the hard drive and have the OS and all other programs on the drive work right off the bat, you will need to image it or clone it using Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. I have used both those backup programs and they work perfectly. Neither of them are freeware. If you just want to back up data, then Cobian works great, and it is freeware.


    Correct me if I am wrong, but Norton Ghost would allow me to image the drive. Does Ghost have a shell that you boot into to copy the image to the new drive and then boot from that? Do I need to worry about borking up my drive letters? (currently swap is C, Windows is on E, and there's extra storage on H, all on the same hard drive I want to reformat)
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    Yes. The "shell" is PC DOS, which Ghost boots to in a clone or image operation.
  • khankhan New
    edited December 2006
    Leonardo wrote:
    Yes. The "shell" is PC DOS, which Ghost boots to in a clone or image operation.

    True to custom for me, I gave this a shot and now have a non-booting machine. It tells me to "pick another boot device or insert bootable media" when I boot up.

    Here's what I did:

    used ghost to put an image of my former Windows drive (was E:, with a C: swap). Image was saved to H:. D: and G: were both storage drives. Somehow the drive letters got reassigned when I reformatted the partions (deleted and recreated, probably the source of my problem), and it made my former swap G:, my former E: was then C:. I've got them both reformatted now, but when it reassigned everything, another of my storage drives is now E:. I think for it to be happy I need the lettering the way it was. I restored the image to G: (the new E:). I don't really know what to do from here...

    By the way, the full configuration of my drives is:
    200 gb IDE <- 2 partitions, 2 gb swap, the rest for windows
    200 gb IDE <- storage
    250 gb SATA <- storage
    250 gb SATA <- hosting norton ghost image.

    Where do I go from here?
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