My apology for being Off Topic here, although I guess the question could be peripherally related to the empeg...

I recently upgraded my home PC with a pair of 7200 RPM Western Digital 40GB hard drives, with the idea of using one for my data and programs, the other for backup. (My MP3 collection had pretty well filled my old 15 GB hard drive.)

I figured Powerquest's Drive Image 4.0 would make a nice backup program -- I would just copy the whole partition from C: to D:, and if my C: drive cratered, all I had to do was swap the jumpers and make the D: drive the C: drive, and I would be right back in business without having to reinstall Windows and all my software.

That part of it works -- I can use either drive as Master, boot from either one.

The problem is that Drive Image takes a great deal longer than I had expected to copy my 15GB partition from C: to D:. I was expecting to take about 15--30 minutes; in fact it is taking more than two hours. This is with all the advanced options set to maximize speed: SMART turned on, file structure checking and surface checking turned off.

I haven't had the patience to sit and watch the screen for two hours... but it seems to spend about the first hour (or more?) in a phase vaguely described as "Verifying Destination". When the actual copying finally begins, the status bar tells me it is running at about 300 MB per minute. (yes, per minute!)

Does anyone have experience with Drive Image? Can you tell me whether these times are typical, or am I doing something wrong or perhaps have a hardware problem? I would have thought a drive to drive copy across a 66 MHz bus (I think that's what it is) would go pretty fast. The processor is a 500MHz AMD K6-2. There is 128 MB of RAM.

Does anyone have experience with Symantec's "Ghost", which I understand does things similar to Drive Image?

Should I instead set my system up so that C: and D: are just mirrored all the time? How do I do that -- is that a software thing or hardware?

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"