Using Parted Magic to Ghost System Drives

This lovely live CD saved me, or rather it would have, had I bothered to use it when I first setup my computer at work with Windows 2008 server.

You see what happened to me yesterday was that as I was testing the installer and uninstaller for our next release a gremlin got into my system and corrupted the registry settings for the latest copy that I had just installed. This was all well and good until I decided to run the uninstaller on the broken install and when it got to the point of deleting files it read the corrupted entry and thought the install directory was "/" as a result it started deleting random files from my system hard drive.

Unfortunately as I had only thought about cloning my system drive I was left with the task of reinstalling my computer from scratch. In a effort to see the positive side of this whole thing I am telling myself that I was probably due for a system clean up anyway, but its not quite working for me. So this time around I have taken the extra step of using Parted Magic a live CD with partitioning and disc tools on it to clone my drive, the features are listed below.

Features

• Format internal and external hard drives.

• Move, copy, create, delete, expand & shrink hard drive partitions.

• Clone your hard drive, to create a full backup.

• Test hard drives for impending failure.

• Test memory for bad sectors.

• Benchmark your computer for a performance rating.

• Securely erase your entire hard drive, wiping it clean from all data.

• Gives access to non-booting systems allowing you to rescue important data.

• Runs from the CD, no install required.

Using Parted Magic it only took around 15 minutes to clone my freshly setup system drive to my secondary hard disc in preparation for the next time that I destroy my system install. Which I have to admit happens a little too frequently for my liking as I spend a lot of time at work installing, uninstalling and upgrading  software while testing. Once I completed the cloning I tested a restore to make sure it worked and in only ten minutes or so I had a freshly restored system.

Now that I have armed myself with a clone of my system drive I can resume my work duties happy in the knowledge that even if everything goes pear shaped again I can get up and running again a whole lot quicker than a complete system reinstall, except for a few personalization tasks and updating to the latest code bases I can be back up and only in 20 minutes.