 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group DriveCopy George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
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As new programs get larger and hard drive prices fall, more and more users
are installing a second hard disk in their computers. Members of Melb PC often install the second drive by
themselves as this is within the capabilities of many users. Numerous articles have been written on that
subject and some magazines, such as Australian PC User that include a sample CD, have even included
video and sound instructions installing a second drive.
Having installed that second drive, most users would like to make it their C: drive and the old disk the D:
drive. The problem is how to copy all the files, including the hidden and system files to the new drive.
With DOS and Windows 3.1 the problem is that XCOPY will not copy hidden or system files and users must rely
on other software tools, if they have them. These tools are used to find and remove the protection, copy the
files and reapply the protect to the files. If the computer is a server, or even a workstation on a LAN,
there may be quite a few such files.
Windows 95's XCOPY32 has many extra commands, including those which enable you to copy system and hidden
files. But there is a catch. When Windows 95 is active, there are open files that will not get copied. And,
in DOS mode, XCOPY32 is not available, so again the user must know which files were missed, and manually copy
them all into the appropriate folders.
PowerQuest to the rescue
This is why PowerQuest developed DriveCopy. PowerQuest, you may already know, is the maker of the excellent
program, Partition Magic (reviewed in PC Update, April 1997).
DriveCopy is designed specifically for copying entire hard disks. This product safely copies the contents of
an entire old drive to a new drive, and makes it a bootable disk, and you do not need to backup
beforehand. DriveCopy handles DOS, Windows 3.1 and 95 as well as OS/2 and NT disks. If your existing drive
has partitions, DriveCopy maintains the partitions' size ratio on the new drive. This means if you have three
partitions on a 500 MB drive and the new drive is 2 GB, all partitions will be four times bigger on the new
drive than they were on the old. You cannot alter the ratio (possibly because PowerQuest also want to sell
Partition Magic for users that want to resize their drive partitions without losing data).
Failsafe copy mode
DriveCopy's failsafe copy mode copies data from the original to the new disk. If power fails during this
process the original data is not affected and you just have to restart the copying. To start the copying
process you boot from a floppy disk, to ensure that no files remain open. You then run DriveCopy from the
floppy disk.
DriveCopy's only shortcomings are that it requires the target hard drive to be the master drive and the
source (your original) hard drive to be a slave drive. And everything on the target drive is destroyed. This
means that DriveCopy must be used immediately after installing the new drive and changing the BIOS settings,
but before any data is copied onto it. The manual that comes with DriveCopy is good, with diagrams on how to
connect drives. It also includes master/slave settings for common drives as well as Internet addresses for
all disk manufacturers. The tech support phone numbers are in the USA.
DriveCopy sells for about $50. A dealer charges about $75 to install a second drive, that you purchased from
them, and copy your data to it.
With DriveCopy you can do it all yourself, without carrying the computer to a dealer and waiting to get it
back.
Reprinted from the July 1997 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
