Using Clonezilla across IDE and SCSI drives
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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I have an Asus A7V133 motherboard with the Promise SCSI controller built in. Attached to this controller is a removable drive bay which I have been using to make backups my my Win98 system using XXCopy. Well, I am finally going to upgrade to WinXP because too many things just don't support Win9x anymore. (Yeah, I know Vista has just been released. That's me, live on the trailing edge... :) ) I have heard that simple copy won't work with XP and so I am wondering if Clonezilla can do what I want to do -- copy partitions from the IDE drive to the SCSI controlled drive so I can continue to use a cheap HD for backup instead of having to go for expensive tape or futz around with piles of CDs/DVDs. And of course, restore from the SCSI drive if necessary.
Also, I plan to eventually just swap the drives after a while in order to extend the life of both -- using the 'backup' as a boot drive and turning the main drive into backup. If I clone the entire drive, is this doable without some tricky modifications?
If you mean save the system in IDE HD as an image file (directory, actually) in your SCSI HD, yes, Clonezilla is capable to do that.
If you mean directly clone the system in IDE HD to your SCSI HD, some issues you might have. Especially the SCSI driver problem in M$ XP.
Argh...
First of all, the plan is to use the 'Live' CD and not boot XP when doing the backups/clones. :) So, it's a question of whether the 'Live' CD has the drivers for the Promise HD controller. After that, I do wonder about the difference in the interface causing problems but these are two identical drives. I deliberately bought two of the same drive so I could continue to make convenient backups. I am considering re-connecting the drive bay to the IDE cable and leaving the SCSI controller idle if that will make a true clone possible and let me swap drives if/when I want or need to.
But the Promise SCSI controller is noticeably faster than the standard IDE controller so I was hoping to continue to use it. I was even thinking of using it exclusively and letting the standard IDE go idle -- except for the CD burner. :) But Windows XP has SCSI driver issues? :( That sounds like running on the Promise controller as my primary could be a problem.
If you M$ windows XP includes the driver for Promise controller, I think it should be fine. However, this is just a guess, since I never try that. Some users reported they have no problem when they clone XP from IDE HD image to SCSI HD via clonezilla.