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Why Winblows Sucks - Reason #5 Billion

As mentioned in my previous post I've been attempting to clone the 2 partitions in Erin's existing laptop hard drive to the 80GB hard drive I had just swapped out of my Powerbook. I had high hopes for this software that I found, DriveImage XML, because it was a free (bonus!) program that seemed like it could do something similar to CCC on the Mac.

The first stumbling block I ran into was the lack of a real Firewire port on PC laptops. Instead they use that half-assed non-powered port that uses a different, smaller connector and requires an AC adapter to be connected to the external hard drive case. So I couldn't connect the new HD to Erin's laptop directly. Instead I hooked it up to my desktop machine.

I then used DriveImage XML to create an image of both partitions and then copied the image over to my desktop machine. However, when I tried to restore the image from my desktop machine to the 80GB hard drive, blam! Error. Tech support wasn't much help, directing me to a writeup some guy did about how to backup and restore using their product.

After trying it a few more times with the same result, I decided to try using Norton Ghost 2003 instead. It's supposed to work more or less the same as DriveImage XML but Ghost is much more annoying cause it reboots the machine when it wants to backup or restore anything. During backup, I wanted it to save the image file directly to my desktop over the network so I had to make sure I had my router's DHCP turned on because it runs DOS and didn't seem to take the manual IP address that I had set on the laptop.

After imaging, I tried to restore to the new drive. Error again, this time because Ghost couldn't find the partition I wanted it to restore to because it was an external Firewire drive, EVEN THOUGH I had specified that it should load the required Firewire drivers when it rebooted to run its restore program. What a bunch of crap!

So right now I'm waiting for a new USB2.0 external HD enclosure to arrive ($.99 on eBay! $8.99 shipping. =p) so I can try to connect the 80GB HD directly to Erin's laptop and attempt a direct copy using DriveImage XML again. Not holding my breath but at least I'll have a slimmer external HD enclosure that'll work on Macs and PCs now. =p

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 9, 2006 11:09 AM.

The previous post in this blog was ROTFL.

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