About Hard Drive Cloning

Hard drive cloning is a necessity, especially in an enterprise application in order to perform upgrades and perform image manipulation by creating similar images or builds deployed to end users. It is a good way to get a full back up of the hard drive. In an enterprise setting, it is important to have servers in pairs for redundancy, and one of the steps to ensure that the two servers are in the exact image of each other is by doing disk cloning.

Function

Hard drive cloning is a process of copying the full contents of the hard drive into a new hard drive. Included in the copying are all the programs, software, files and other contents. Disk cloning is similar to disk mirroring, which is a creation of an exact replica of the hard drive. Disk cloning functions as an imaging tool and as a recovery tool. At times when the original hard drive becomes corrupted, you would need to restore some files. You can do this through a back up or through your disk cloning. Disk cloning is also useful when you are building multiple computers with the same disk image. Disk cloning can provide this function. You would also use disk cloning to upgrade your hard drive with more capacity but you want to use the same image and keep all the files from the old hard drive. You can also use disk cloning to back up your system for future use.

Types

There are two main types of hard drive cloning. One is using the traditional way of cloning hard drives without using any disk cloning software. The traditional way takes longer to perform and requires the person doing this to be comfortable with doing hard drive partitions or formatting of drives.
The second type is using the disk cloning software that allows you to simply run the program and follow the prompts until the work is complete.

Procedures

To perform a hard drive cloning of a computer without using a disk cloning software, create one or more partitions on the disk and format each partition to create the file systems. Next, install the operating system and the install the device drivers needed for the hardware. Finally, install the application software.
With the use of a disk cloning software, you can simplify the steps to create an image on a hard disk and clone the first disk to the remaining computers. The software can run on its own to perform the cloning. All you have to do is press a few keys.

Post Installation

Provide a different name or IP (Internet Protocol) address for the new hard drive so there will not be any IP or DNS (Domain Name System) conflicts due to duplicate names and IPs. Similar SID (Security Identification) cannot happen within the same Active Directory, therefore, the SID of the new hard disk should be different from the original hard disk.

Requirements

It is important to choose a disk cloning software that can read files, even the protected ones. It should also ensure consistency between the two hard drives. When using a hard drive that has a pre-existing operating system, the disk cloning software should be able to overwrite it. When running disk cloning programs under non-Windows operating systems, ensure that the same device drivers are present. A good disk cloning software can provide the necessary device drivers if it is not available from the manufacturers website or installation CDs. It also contains its own TCP/IP stack used for transferring data using multicast transfer method.

Resources

• Cloning and Booting Hard Disks

[MidniteWriter]

on 1/6/2009 You know your stuff, thanks for sharing!