Hi Anders:

First, let me thank you for a great piece of software. As a software developer myself, I understand and appreciate what you've done here with this product. Thanks, too, for making it free.

Now, to my situation and problems. I'm running Windows XP Home and have been having problems with a flaky C: drive that keeps developing bad spots. After a call to the manufacturer, a new drive was shipped to me. Now, all I have to do is copy the contents of my old C: drive to my new C: drive (which I'm temporarily installing as D:). The end result that I'm hoping to get is that I'll have an exact working copy of the old drive's information (including WinXP) on the new drive so all I'll have to do is move it into my system as the main C: drive and all will be great.

I am having two problems, though. First, I successfully backed up from C: to D: but, when I tried to use the new drive as a bootable drive, it complained to me that certain files (ones that I can only assume were active during the backup) are not present on the drive and, as such, it won't boot. I thought that there might be a fix for this situation, though, so I downloaded the new beta version from your website and tried that. It didn't give me any problems up to about 95% complete. As it was copying what I believe was the last file on the system, NHB hung up and refused to respond. I have not rebooted or tried it again since then, but I can. It is backing up around 13 GB of information in around 120,400 or so files.

Any thoughts? Do I need to make the new drive Windows XP compliant (and bootable) somehow before doing the backup to it? Should I log in on WinXP as a different user to do the backup? If you or anyone else have any suggestions for how I can get past this problem, I'd really appreciate your assistance. And, after reading some of the other messages out here about system hanging problems, I'm going to retry the backup again and see if I have any better success.

Thanks again, Anders, for this great app!

Jon

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2003

Answers

Hi Jon.

Here are some thought:

1) "Do I need to make the new drive Windows XP compliant (and bootable) somehow before doing the backup to it?"

Yes you do. It is not enough to copy all files and folders from the C to the D drive. You see, all operating systems (like Windows) makes changes to the drive's boot sector. Because of this, in order to dublicate a drive, you'll have to use a ghost (or image) program, like Nortons Ghost (http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/products.cfm?ProductI D=3).

2) I don't understand why NHB locks up. Files being opened should not cause NHB to crash. Once I get my new hard drive I'll do the same thing you've done and se if I can find the bug.

3) About the registry: The windows registry is stored in a couple of files in the windows folder. They are copied like normal files, but you will obviously need windows running on the destination hard drive in order to get things working.

Thanks for the feedback; I hope I've answered most of your questions.

-- Anonymous, March 09, 2003

Hi again, Anders, et. al:

I wanted to post a little more info here about the backup problems. I rebooted and tried the full backup of C: to D: again and, once again, it stopped at 95% on what appeared to be the exact last file being copied. I was able to end that process and tried redoing the backup once again but without first reformatting D:. In this instance, the backup completed to the end. However, it still did not back up 19 files which I assume were "open" files during the procedure. Is there any way to get those files to be backed up?

One last question for now: Does this procedure also back up the system registry?

Thanks!

Jon

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2003