Copying entire drive of a PC

[Aegypticus]

I'm looking for a good way to copy the entire contents of an old PC in an efficient manner. I do not believe that pulling the drives and putting them into my current PC is a good option, but I may be wrong. There's a bit of a story behind that reasoning that I think is a bit interesting, so I'll fill you guys in on my insanity. Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated.

When I built my old gaming PC, I set it up so that the primary drive is a pair of Deskstar 640 GB drives in a raid 0. I do not believe I have any current backups of the contents of that raid. I absolutely know that doing that is a completely terrible and insane idea, especially since the drives are from the same manufacturing lot.

The computer has been sitting idle for several years. Recently, I remembered a whole bunch of stuff that's on there that I now want to recover. I've been dreading even attempting to start it up since I wasn't sure how long an HDD can sit before it might start losing data integrity. I procrastinated for several months because I didn't want to deal with the stress if it didn't boot, but I finally bit the bullet and gave it a go. At first it didn't boot, but I was kind of expecting that it wouldn't due to the CMOS battery probably being dead and the BIOS resetting. After re-configuring the raid in the BIOS (adapter settings to RAID, setting boot orders and stuff), I crossed my fingers and tried again. It booted into Windows with no problems aside from the fans making some terrible noise, I assume from the lubrication deteriorating after all that time idle.

The health of the drives seems to be fine. I did a very low-tech data integrity test by opening a bunch of random files in random directories. Didn't encounter any problems. Immediately after doing that, I shut it down and unplugged it, and now I'm trying to decide the best way to proceed.

Here's where I'm sitting:

• I have no reason to believe that the drives are in imminent danger of failing, but I want to use them as little as possible until I get the data off and safely backed up.
• I have ample storage space in my other computer to dump the entire contents of the old computer on there.
• I currently have the computers sitting in the same room. Both have gigabit network ports. I don't have a good way to network them through a switch where they are, and I can't find my old crossover cable, but some research has led me to believe that one or both computers might have Auto MDI-X ports. How can I determine if I can connect them together with a regular network cable and have that work without starting the computer and fiddling with it?
• I need to do a lot of sorting through junk, so my preference would be to backup everything and then trudge through it at my leisure, rather than attempt to only copy things I want to keep.

So that's about it. My thinking is to (hopefully) connect the computers together with a cat5e cable, copy the entirety of the old computer onto my newer computer, and then sort through it without worrying that the data is going to vanish at any second. Looking for advice on software I'd need, how to configure the network between the computers, etc. Trying to fully prepare everything I'll need to complete the entire process without powering on the old computer before I'm 100% ready.

Thanks for reading through all my ramblings. I'm sure there is pertinent info that I left out, so fire away. I'll also accept any comments about how dumb I was to set things up that way. They'd be well deserved.

[Fuzz]

At least your newest one will probably auto sense, that should be enough. As long as you set the homegroup the same and manually configure your ip address to be on the same subnet and have file sharing on you should be able to do it through windows file sharing.

Easier would just be to plug them both into your router as then you can skip configuring IP addresses manually. Whatever you do you shouldn't need software, though I would personally use Fastcopy becuase if Windows file copy craps out, you have to start over. And Fastcopy is faster.

Or use a USB drive if you have one lying around.

[ken0042]

What about something like this:
http://www.cablestogo.com/product/39...SB-Transfer-QR

[Aegypticus]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

At least your newest one will probably auto sense, that should be enough. As long as you set the homegroup the same and manually configure your ip address to be on the same subnet and have file sharing on you should be able to do it through windows file sharing.

Easier would just be to plug them both into your router as then you can skip configuring IP addresses manually. Whatever you do you shouldn't need software, though I would personally use Fastcopy becuase if Windows file copy craps out, you have to start over. And Fastcopy is faster.

Or use a USB drive if you have one lying around.

So hauling one computer to the switch, or at least to a wall port that's wired to the switch, is an easier option? I can probably manage that.

Thanks for the recommendation of Fastcopy. I assume I can just select a drive letter for copying? The fact that the drive I'm copying will also be in use running Windows won't cause me any issues, correct?

I'll have to figure out how to configure Windows networking. It's something I've never had much success with and kind of never bothered to learn how to make it work, but I guess now is as good a time as any.

Originally Posted by ken0042

What about something like this:
http://www.cablestogo.com/product/39...SB-Transfer-QR

That's a pretty neat product. I'll keep it in mind if other things don't work.

[TheDragon]

If it were me, I'd literally just yank the drives out of the old computer, and put them in an external drive chassis, and either DD them with a a Linux OS off of a USB drive, or clone them a partition with some cloning software, (I've used Marcrium Reflect before - works great.)

[Fuzz]

On the old computer you will have to share the drive, then you will have a network share, like \\old_computer\c

There are plenty of articles that explain sharing and homegroups on the net.

In Fastcopy you enter \\old_computer\c as your source and wherever you want to copy it to on your new computer, like C:\old_data as your destination. It will skip over any files it can't access, but you won't need most of those anyway as they will be part of the old OS.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by TheDragon

If it were me, I'd literally just yank the drives out of the old computer, and put them in an external drive chassis, and either DD them with a a Linux OS off of a USB drive, or clone them a partition with some cloning software, (I've used Marcrium Reflect before - works great.)

It's RAID 0, that would be a bad idea.

[psyang]

I'd either clone the raid partition to another (single) drive, or make an image of the raid partition to an external drive, depending on drive space. I own a copy of Acronis which I use for business purposes, but I've used Macrium Reflect Free before for personal use.

I know Macrium supports hardware raid 0 for sure - would be surprised if it didn't support software raid 0 either - at least to create an image.

[TheDragon]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

It's RAID 0, that would be a bad idea.

Missed that part. There are RAID cloners out there, though. Although you're right, I'm not sure I'd want to use them with a RAID 0 configuration.

[Hack&Lube]

It's not a good idea to rebuild the RAID configuration in a new system. You're best keeping the RAID 0 set in the old computer to retrieve the data.

Your two simple options:

1. Install a spare drive with adequate space into your old computer and then either manually copy, back-up, or clone the RAID partition to the spare drive. Acronis Free and Macrium Reflect are good at this

2. Connect the old PC to your network and navigate to it or map a network drive to it. Remember the name of the old PC will be the domain so the username would be "old-PC-NETBIOS-name\Your-User-Account-On-Your-Old-PC". Then proceed to copy/backup your data over the network share or mapped drive letter.

[Aegypticus]

Yeah, now that I think about it some more, the 2 TB drive in my current computer should be fairly easy to remove and it has a ton of free space. It didn't even occur to me to do that, but putting that in the old computer temporarily and cloning/copying the drive seems like a good option. If I were doing that instead of going over the network, is Acronis Free or Macrium Reflect a better option that Fastcopy? Is there one that does a better job at cloning/copying a drive that's currently also running the OS?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Aegypticus

Yeah, now that I think about it some more, the 2 TB drive in my current computer should be fairly easy to remove and it has a ton of free space. It didn't even occur to me to do that, but putting that in the old computer temporarily and cloning/copying the drive seems like a good option. If I were doing that instead of going over the network, is Acronis Free or Macrium Reflect a better option that Fastcopy? Is there one that does a better job at cloning/copying a drive that's currently also running the OS?

Acronis and Macrium can build a backup and restore that includes the hidden boot partitions of an OS drive and other occupied information through VSS. I have no knowledge of Fastcopy. IIRC, it's possible to install those tools on a USB boot drive and run a mini OS on that as well. Macrium also has a USB thumb drive version with Windows PE so you would just boot the whole OS off USB if you wanted that alternative.

[Aegypticus]

Thanks a lot for the help, everyone. I'll give some things a try and report back later. I really should have thought of putting my storage drive from my current computer into the old one. It's even in a hot-swap bay, but I've never actually used it as one. It's just part of my case.

[Fuzz]

I don't think there is much point in cloning the drive if you just want the data. Just copy it. If you are putting the drive in your old PC, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from RAID, as it may default to your "new" drive when you install it and try to boot from that.

[Aegypticus]

I took my storage drive out of my current computer and put it in the old computer temporarily. Backed up the storage drive before I did that. Got everything copied over using Fastcopy, which I chose because of how simple it is. I literally just pointed at each drive letter and copied the entire thing. Took about 3 hours in total, which I could have reduced by a lot if I had been more selective, but oh well.

Thanks again for the advice. Now I can sort through this massive cluster#### at my leisure. It's a big relief to have everything (sort of) backed up. Even if the drives are still in the same house, at least the data exists on two drives in two different machines.

[J Diddy]

Another option is to use VMWare converter and convert the old PC to a virtual machine. Then use VMWare Player (or workstation) on your new PC to run the virtual machine. This way you have a complete copy of the data and the OS and your settings etc.

This is a method I use when I help people with their computers. Because if I just copy the data the next day they are asking me where the settings for application X are or why isn't software B working the way it was on my old PC. With a virtual machine you can check those things.

[photon]

I've done the VMWare converter thing before as well, did it just in case some strange setting in my development environment didn't migrate over. Works quite well.

[Aegypticus]

I'd go a route like that but I honestly don't place any value on the current configuration of the old PC. I wanted to get the data off, which I do value, and now my goal is to get the free Windows 10 upgrade on that one (from Windows 7 Pro) and then re-purpose it. Anyone know what the threshold of hardware changes is now for it to no longer be considered the same computer by the OS? I wouldn't be doing a huge amount of swapping things, but maybe a bit.

[Aegypticus]

Anyone know of a good and free software KVM-type type thing that will work over a wired network?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Aegypticus

Anyone know of a good and free software KVM-type type thing that will work over a wired network?

What exactly are you doing? Just use remote desktop. That works very well.