Author Topic: A real lifesaver of a utility, get yours now. (Read 358 times)

snafu · « **on:** March 01, 2002, 01:16:18 PM »

Whir, screech, click, click, click. went the hard drive

After a dos scandisk (Couldn't get back into windows straight away) I was finally face to face with nearly 1gb of bad sectors on my HD, No warning nothing. Thorough scandisk & Defrag every week had never shown anything amiss. At this point panic set in, over 20gb of data is on that drive and even allowing for the fact that I can always reload most things from the original CD's all the "settings" and customisation to games etc would have to be saved at the very least. At least I could now get back into Windows, Another thorough scandisk in windows implied that fortunately all the bad sectors seemed to be in an unused part of the drive but obviously it was in it's death throws.

After buying a new HD I was faced with the daunting task of either trying to remember exactly what I would need to backup to CD's and installing Windows from scratch followed by all the games etc and finally trying to reload my settings from all the CD's, or... buy Norton Ghost or similar and use that to transfer the data. Enter "XXCOPY".

This is a fantastic little utility, Don't confuse it with the Windows "Xcopy" command. This little beast is bloody fantastic. It's basically a "Disk Cloning" program. It doesn't duplicate your original disk (So works with different capacities) and it doesn't present you with a "Bootable drive" (You have to use "FDISK" to do this). But it does seem to do everything else. "Long file names" etc are handled (xcopy and a number of other disk cloning progams cross link these). The instruction pages are very well written and even having never used the program before I managed to start off with a virgin drive and end up with the system up and running on the new drive as if nothing had ever happened in about 3 hours.

How much is this little gem? It's "freeware", Don't take my word for it have a look here XXCOPY Web Page The complete download fits on a diskette, Keep it incase you ever need it. It has so many other uses, If you buy a bigger hard drive you can use it to move everything across, or you can use if via a simple batch file to duplicate your HD as a backup, The backup is accessable as another drive after the copy so you can restore specific files if you need to. I'm really impressed with this and just had to tell someone

TTFN
snafu

K West · « **Reply #1 on:** March 01, 2002, 02:24:39 PM »

"If you buy a bigger hard drive you can use it to move everything across.."

!!!!

A BIG thanks for the heads up. I am just about to do that, buy a larger HDD (20g or so) for my PC and move my old 8.4g drive to the 2nd pc which only has 1.2g. This will save me a LOT of aggravation and time!

Really. Thanks!!

Westy

SKurj · « **Reply #2 on:** March 01, 2002, 06:40:48 PM »

GHOST can do some of that stuff too, though i don't think its free...

SKurj

snafu · « **Reply #3 on:** March 01, 2002, 08:35:57 PM »

Hi Skurj,
Yes Ghost will do the same job (And make the new drive bootable as part of the process I think). I was going to "Borrow" a copy from work where they use it to create "base" images" for new PC's but as you say it's not free. It aint cheap either. At least this way my conscience is clear.

K West ,
My original disk was a 30gb my new one is 40gb so I can confirm it does do disks of different capacities. You can even carry on working on the PC while it does the job, Just run it again when it finishes, it only takes a few minutes for the 2nd run as it updates rather than overwrites.

TTFN
snafu