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DriveCopy ver 3.0
by By Brian K. Lewis, Ph.D.— Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. , admin@spcug.org - January 21, 2001 at 19:03:07:
DriveCopy from PowerQuest Corporation has been reviewed several times before as its original version has been around for several years. The various upgrades have allowed it to work with larger and larger hard drives as well as the various File Allocation Tables. It was originally designed to allow you to copy an entire hard drive to a new drive complete with the information needed to boot the new drive. This new version has some added capabilities. It can back up your existing drive to another drive even if the new drive is larger than 8.4GB. Each partition is automaticall====== Jnauary 2000 Product Reviews ======y resized to fit the new, larger drive. Also, it can selectively copy drive partitions.The installation of DriveCopy is quite unique among modern software programs. It does not install itself to your hard disk. Instead, it creates two floppy disks. The first disk contains the boot files and the second has the DriveCopy software. The reason for this is that DriveCopy runs only in DOS mode. It does not run under Windows. It can copy drives or partitions that have been formatted with all versions of Windows, DOS, OS/2 and Linux. However, the floppy disks must be created under Windows or DOS.
I found using DriveCopy to be quite simple. In my case, I needed to replace a 4GB hard drive with a 10GB drive. Usually, the new drive would be installed as the “master” drive and the older drive as the “slave” drive. This is done by changing a set of jumpers on each drive. The DriveCopy CD-ROM has a menu selection, which takes you to a web site that is linked to pages with drive jumper information. Since the 4GB drive was a Micropolis drive, I needed information on its jumper setup and found it easily using this web link. Unfortunately, it did not work. The Micropolis drive could not be set as a slave drive. Luckily, this new version of DriveCopy doesn’t care which drive is the master. So, I jumpered the new drive as the slave, after that the BIOS was able to identify both drives.
Next, I booted the system with the floppy provided with DriveCopy. Then I inserted the second floppy and DriveCopy loaded. The program has a very nice graphic interface that leads the user through the process. The next step was to click on the “Entire Disk to Disk Copy” button. The next screen was used to select the source and destination drives. In this case, the program had already checked the 4GB drive as the source and the 10GB as the destination. So on to the next screen. On this screen, you select “Replace” or “Backup”. So I selected “Replace”. One more choice had to be made on the next screen. Since I had already verified the integrity of the source drive and the destination drive was new, I selected “Fast Mode” instead of “Safe Mode.” Using “Safe Mode” or the copy process results in verification of all disk writes and greatly increases the time required for the total process. Now click on “Finish” to begin the actual copying process. The copy process proceeded at about 200MB per minute.
After the whole process was completed, I shut down the system and removed the 4GB drive. Then I re-jumpered the 10GB as the “master” drive and re-booted the system. Everything ran perfectly with no errors. Next, I ran ScanDisk and Defrag just to clean up the new hard drive.
The user guide is quite well done with only a few minor errors. It has a number of very helpful screen shots. It also has a number of sample scenarios to help you with both normal and somewhat unusual drive copy processes. The guide also has an index. However, it’s reference to Linux in the index led to a page that had no information on Linux.
All in all, DriveCopy is like the other PowerQuest software I have used. It does just exactly what it says it will do. It is easy to work with and if you need to copy a drive to another drive, you can’t find better software to do it.
DriveCopy is available directly from PowerQuest at a price of $29.95 from their Website: www.powerquest.com . PowerQuest Corporation, P O Box 1911, Orem UT 84059-1911, 1-800-379-2566.
:Copyright 2000. This article is from the September 2000 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. http://www.spcug.org/
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