Last week I mentioned that I’d seen an intriguing post on Lifehacker entitled “Copy and Paste your Entire Hard Drive with Two Clicks with GParted.” This sounded rather improbable to me, but I wanted to check it out.

There was a small problem with doing so, because the link on the Lifehacker site is broken, but I figured out how to fix it and was able to go over to Sourceforge to download the GParted Live CD .iso file. (“GParted” stands for “Gnome Partition Editor,” but that’s not of particular interest to the non-geek, and in particular the non-Linux geek.)

At first it seemed a bit strange to be using a Linux tool to back up a Windows drive, though at second thought it actually makes sense. I automatically distrust anything that tries to back up the Windows operating system from within Windows, because the system state keeps changing. I normally make drive images using Ghost 8 after booting my machine from the non-Windows Bart-PE CD. (PE stands for Pre-Environment, another thing you probably don’t want to know about. Bart is just the guy who assembled this useful CD.)

Assembling the Bart-PE CD was beyond me; the Ur-Guru made mine. But the GParted Live CD is ready to burn: just start up your CD-burning software, open the .iso file, and burn. Presto: a bootable CD.

So I shut down my computer and booted from the CD, and after selecting the appropriate language/keyboard layout, I was in GParted and it was showing me the partitions on my C drive. Not that it actually said “C drive,” mind you. It said “dev/hda1″. “Dev” stands for “device,” and there’s a menu at the top where you get to choose devices. My choices were hda1 (my C drive), hda2 (my D drive), and sda1 (the FreeAgent Go drive). My Maxtor Shared Storage II network drive was conspicuous by its absence.

That was the first problem, because if you copy a partition with GParted, you have to copy the whole thing, and it doesn’t get compressed. I don’t have 80 GB free on either the D drive or the F drive. So there was no place to put the drive if I copied it.

And even if I’d been able to see the network drive (which has about 200 GB free at the moment), copying and pasting with GParted doesn’t just fill in empty space, but reformats the whole drive, thus wiping out anything on there. (It does give you a big warning prompt to prevent you from doing so.)

So yesterday I pulled out my not-yet-recycled X drive, which was completely empty and is an 80 GB drive like my C drive, hooked it up to the USB port, and rebooted with the PArted Live CD. I was then able to select the partition representing the C drive (hda1), hit the “copy” button, select the partition representing the X drive (sda2), hit the “paste” button, and apply the operation.

I was a little surprised that I had to do something more than hit the “paste” button to start the drive copy, though when you’re partitioning drives and potentially removing all the data on them, it’s not a bad idea to have to take an extra step or two. But even without that, it’s definitely more than two clicks, because you have to navigate between partitions.

Still, once you get past the unfamiliar-to-Windows-users (and probably even less familiar to Mac users) interface, it is a straightforward procedure. I hit the “apply” button and off it went.

Copying 80 GB is not a speedy activity even over USB 2.0 hi-speed, but I was about to leave for a client appointment anyway. I started the copying around 9 or 9:30 AM, and when I got home at about 1:30 PM it was finished. I exited GParted, selected “eject and reboot” from the shut down menu, and took a look at the X drive in Windows Explorer.

It was all there: everything on the C drive, including the label “local disk.” I’m presuming I could boot from the X drive, now, as long as I set the BIOS on my machine to look for a USB device before checking the local hard drive. And I could use GParted again to copy the partition onto a new machine—though it would have to have identical hardware for me to be confident that there wouldn’t be weird issues with drivers for things like sound and graphics cards that would mess it up.

I’m not likely to start using GParted instead of Ghost, if only because I can do the Ghost backups onto my network drive and keep several of them there. But it’s free and it requires only a moderate degree of geekiness to use. It also handles just about any conceivable file system, so you should be able to use it on Macs as well as PCs and Linux boxes. And restoring files from the GParted backup doesn’t require any proprietary software. (That’s the good news and the bad news, as there’s no way to encrypt the files and anyone could take that drive and have access to everything in my machine.)

Two clicks is definitely an exaggeration, though. Perhaps I should talk to Lifehacker about truth in advertising.

Read IntroAnalytic’s press release at http://www.introanalytic.com/BackupResearchMediaRelease.pdf

The DM Review editorial staff reprises the press release: http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleId=1049420

Comments on the study from Chris Mellor at TechWorld: http://www.techworld.com/storage/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=3&entryID=152

The Ur-Guru suggested I take a look into the BIOS (that stands for Basic Input/Output System) to see whether there was something in those settings. So I restarted the computer and made a quick stab for the F2 key, which happens to be the key that enables me to enter Setup on Astarte. (I think it was the DEL key on Keramat; each manufacturer seems to choose its own, though F1 is almost always reserved for Help.) In wandering through the several pages of Setup functions, I was able to switch the infrared port on, but I didn’t find anything that affected USB.

So the Ur-Guru came to my rescue and provided me with a special CD from which I could boot into a “preinstalled environment” (that is to say, a sort of scaled-down operating system) and run Ghost 8. This CD is not produced by Symantec, but was created by a Dutch systems administrator named Bart Lagerweij to make his own life easier. His Bart-PE (there’s that Preinstalled Environment again) is distributed free of charge from http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/. (It’s 2 MB download.) Bart is really providing a tremendous service, as the CD is useful for a whole lot of diagnostic and repair functions; Ghost 8 is almost an afterthought from Bart’s perspective.

Before you can create the CD itself and use it, you need to have your Windows XP CD on hand (preferably with Service Packs 1 and 2 integrated, unless you want to engage in a tricky process called slipstreaming, which I personally would rather not get into). If your storage device (CD-ROM, external hard drive, removable drive, or whatever) came with special drivers, you have to put those into the “drivers” subfolder in the directory where you installed the PE-builder. And in order to use the additional software (Symantec Ghost Corporate 8, Nero Burning ROM, Disk Commander and ERD Commander 2002 by Winternals) legally, you also have to buy that software if you don’t own it already.

Then you can start PE-Builder, insert your Windows XP CD, create your .iso file (that’s the extension used by the “image” used to make a CD, particularly a bootable CD), and burn it to a CD. And then you can insert the CD in your CD drive, restart, and see whether it works.

If your eyes are glazing, you’re not alone. Bart-PE was created as a way to make life easier for Bart’s fellow geeks, and while he has made the overall process fairly straightforward (despite the pages of descriptive details, legal disclaimers, and other technical information on the website), this may well not be something you want to do yourself. As I said before, the Ur-Guru created the one I used last week.

However, while I’ve been typing this, I downloaded PE-Builder, installed it, grabbed my XP CD, and created my own CD—admittedly without adding any extra drivers to it. Neither my CD/DVD-writer nor my external hard drive actually came with any additional drivers for Windows XP. (I suppose if I felt really adventurous I could try adding the Windows 98 drivers.) Unfortunately, I also forgot to add the “plugins” folder, so while I got a perfectly good bootable disk, it didn’t have Ghost 8 on it. I’m now trying it again, and the CD (now with rather more data on it) is burning merrily away. Testing this one will require another restart.

So, as you can see, this is a slow process, and for many people it’s not going to be worth it either to do it themselves or to have someone else do it. For those of us who think Ghost 8 is miles better than Ghost 9, it’s definitely worth it.

For the rest of the world, I’m going to report on my cross-comparison between Dantz Retrospect and Acronis TrueImage next week.