Around tuesday last week, my laptop's 20 gig harddrive started making really ugly noises (thumping really hard). I'd have the feeling it would be dead soon for a while, because of a few errors I'd spotted on the event log, so it came as no surprise. It was rather sad, though.

Anyway, I decided not too wait until it was fully dead, so I immediately backed up important files (yet again), and then went on and bought a new drive. I ended up getting a new 40 gig drive, so it was all not that bad, as I can use the extra space, but boy, these 2.5 inched drives are expensive!

Since I'm really lazy, and I had all kind of things installed, I decided to try something before replacing the original drive: imaging it. For that, I decided to use Ghost4Unix, which allows you to upload a compressed image of the entire drive unto an FTP server, and later download to the drive again. I'm happy to say it worked nicely, and Windows Server 2003 booted right away from the new drive as if nothing had changed. Simply added a new 18 gig partition, and I was set to go.

Needless to say, uploading and downloading the images can take quite a few hours, given the size...


Tomas Restrepo

Software developer located in Colombia.