Cloning - wrong drive letter to boot?

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

Lamberto Vitali said:
I often have them fail well before their expected lifetime. Far less reliable than the rust spinners. Kinda like the first LED lightbulbs. Power efficiency doesn't concern me since the CPU and GPU eat way more power.

You "often" have them fail. Wow, I have about 18 SSD's, some going back to around 2010 give or take and I haven't had a single one fail. My oldest drive is an 80GB Intel X25-M Gen 2 drive. Unsure why you have run into so many problems.

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

glasskuter said:
Disk assignment (at least in my Dell) is not always straightforward and is dependent on the disk configuration in some systems.
My system drive (nvme) is Disk 1 and data drive (HDD configured as gpt) is Disk 0 (stupid Dell).

This isn't a Dell issue really, it's the way that motherboards read the drives. SATA drives are usually numbered first in your system, hence the reason your SATA based HDD is listed as disk 0 and NVME is listed as disk1.

Whenever I build a PC, if it has 2 drives, I always disconnect the others when I lay down the base OS, to ensure that everything gets onto the drive that I expect. While it's a bit of a hassle, Windows cannot put something on a drive that isn't physically connected.

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

Lamberto Vitali said:
Your first mistake, buying a Dell.

I've owned Dell's in the past. I've built computers, I've bought Dells, and I've continued to build computers. There isn't anything inherently wrong with using a Dell. Sure, they may not lend themselves to upgrades with bog standard parts, but chances are that if you are buying yourself a pre-built Dell, you are unlikely to be upgrading major components at a later time.

Lamberto Vitali · Sep 20, 2023

pparks1 said:
You "often" have them fail. Wow, I have about 18 SSD's, some going back to around 2010 give or take and I haven't had a single one fail. My oldest drive is an 80GB Intel X25-M Gen 2 drive. Unsure why you have run into so many problems.

Cheap SSDs? I'll be paying more attention to reliability reviews in future. Mind you I used to stick like glue to supposably reliable Crucial (after having 50% of OCZs fail within a month! I think that company went bankrupt for some reason....no they're Toshiba, I wonder if they were Toshiba when they were rubbish? I don't associate Toshiba with rubbish.) So these Crucial drives.... oops major bug in the firmware, they started disappearing from the BIOS, couldn't see them at all, even to update the firmware to fix the problem! Had to switch them on and off several times in the hope they appeared long enough to update. It was weird, once they'd disappeared once (which happened months after you started using them), it would keep doing it.

pparks1 said:
I've owned Dell's in the past. I've built computers, I've bought Dells, and I've continued to build computers. There isn't anything inherently wrong with using a Dell. Sure, they may not lend themselves to upgrades with bog standard parts, but chances are that if you are buying yourself a pre-built Dell, you are unlikely to be upgrading major components at a later time.

Their proprietary nonsense is precisely why you shouldn't use them. To upgrade them can be more difficult or more expensive. And that proprietary development costs you when you buy them in the first place.

Why on earth would you say you're unlikely to want to upgrade one? Dells are not magical, they will become outdated one day.

TM21 · Sep 20, 2023

There is Nothing wrong with having an opinion, especially when it's based on personal experience.
My own experience with Dells is not all that good, and I've had lots of it. I'm a retired Computer Tech, who used to build as well as repair PC's of all brands. There were several brands of PC's, HD's and other devices that I had to add to my "Never More" list. Dell, tops my list.

I began doing disk to disk copies (CLONES) back in 1997, when I worked in a small PC Repair shop. The shop owner had gotten a copy of "Ghost" a DOS program written in New Zealand. It was a time, when a lot of old and small DOS machines were upgrading to the new Windows, and needed bigger hard drives. Every Tech in the shop had their own copy of Ghost, and when I left that company, I took my copy with me.

Symantec bought the program, and upgraded it to work with the new NTFS format.
I got a copy of that upgraded Ghost, which was DOS version 11.5, the same one I use today. And, it works just as good today, on Windows 11 as it did on any previous Windows version.
Since it runs from a DOS boot disk, it totally bypasses whatever OS or just data that's on the HD. Only a physical problem with the HD can stop Ghost from running.

A clone is a good thing to have, if you have a spare HD that you don't need for anything else. But a C: drive backup image file can be stored on any decent sized HD, with room for several more. I usually keep five backups of my C: drive, on my 1TB Backup Storage drive.
A can restore a backup image file to a new drive, or to my main SSD to fix a problem. Either way, Ghost just works.

Cheers Mates!
TM

Lamberto Vitali · Sep 20, 2023

TechnoMage2021 said:
There is Nothing wrong with having an opinion, especially when it's based on personal experience.
My own experience with Dells is not all that good, and I've had lots of it. I'm a retired Computer Tech, who used to build as well as repair PC's of all brands. There were several brands of PC's, HD's and other devices that I had to add to my "Never More" list. Dell, tops my list.

In about 2007, the place I worked had 200 Dell machines fail within a few months, capacitor plague. 100 had the motherboards replaced under warranty by Dell, they stupidly came out for each individual one and didn't repair the whole lot at once, which they had to eventually, must have cost them a fortune. But the other 100 were out of warranty. Dell wanted (as usual) a stupid price for replacement boards. I got about 50 boards on Ebay cheap, then started buying capacitors and resoldering them myself. They were obvious, there was electrolyte oozing out of them.

TechnoMage2021 said:
I began doing disk to disk copies (CLONES) back in 1997, when I worked in a small PC Repair shop. The shop owner had gotten a copy of "Ghost" a DOS program written in New Zealand.

"Got a copy", ok

TechnoMage2021 said:
It was a time, when a lot of old and small DOS machines were upgrading to the new Windows, and needed bigger hard drives. Every Tech in the shop had their own copy of Ghost, and when I left that company, I took my copy with me.

Symantec bought the program, and upgraded it to work with the new NTFS format.
I got a copy of that upgraded Ghost, which was DOS version 11.5, the same one I use today. And, it works just as good today, on Windows 11 as it did on any previous Windows version.
Since it runs from a DOS boot disk, it totally bypasses whatever OS or just data that's on the HD.

But you have to stop running the machine, I do my backups while I'm still working.

TechnoMage2021 said:
Only a physical problem with the HD can stop Ghost from running.

It shouldn't, it should copy what it can.

TechnoMage2021 said:
A clone is a good thing to have, if you have a spare HD that you don't need for anything else. But a C: drive backup image file can be stored on any decent sized HD, with room for several more.

Just as cheap to buy three small hard disks and have three clones. You don't want all the backups one drive anyway. If it fails too....

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

Lamberto Vitali said:
Cheap SSDs? I'll be paying more attention to reliability reviews in future. Mind you I used to stick like glue to supposably reliable Crucial (after having 50% of OCZs fail within a month! I think that company went bankrupt for some reason....no they're Toshiba, I wonder if they were Toshiba when they were rubbish? I don't associate Toshiba with rubbish.)

Cheap SSD's could be it. There was a time that OCZ's were the best in the biz (performance benchmark wise), but their controllers were garbage and loads of those drives failed. I fortunately never bought one. My friends who bought them all had controller problems, and they ended up replacing them. I've had Intel, WD, PNY (not my favorite, but it was cheap and only for testing), Samsung, and Sandisk. And then whatever model happens to be in my Mac Mini and Macbook Pro.

Lamberto Vitali said:
Their proprietary nonsense is precisely why you shouldn't use them. To upgrade them can be more difficult or more expensive. And that proprietary development costs you when you buy them in the first place.

Why on earth would you say you're unlikely to want to upgrade one? Dells are not magical, they will become outdated one day.

I think generally if you buy a Dell, especially a smaller form factor model or laptop....clearly you wouldn't expect to be able to put in something like a GeForce 4090. You are likely to stick with whatever video card it had. Without upgrading a video card, you aren't likely to be trying to upgrade the power supply (which is usually where you run into the most proprietary issues). Upgrading something like RAM or storage is going to be a non-issue on a dell, nothing crazy there.

So, you may upgrade a bit...but not likely the type of upgrading that an enthusiast who custom builds his computer is going to do. And even somebody like me who does build their own box, when it's time for an upgrade (3 to 5 ish years), I build a whole new rig. I don't re-use a single part from the old one. Rather have 2 working computers in the end. I would expect somebody with a dell would say after 3-5 years, maybe it's just time for a new machine and I'll donate this one to my kid, grandkid, local church, etc.

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

TechnoMage2021 said:
There is Nothing wrong with having an opinion, especially when it's based on personal experience.
My own experience with Dells is not all that good, and I've had lots of it. I'm a retired Computer Tech, who used to build as well as repair PC's of all brands. There were several brands of PC's, HD's and other devices that I had to add to my "Never More" list. Dell, tops my list.

The vast majority of my experience with Dell's is from a work perspective. In the 3 places I have worked, we have all used Dell laptops almost exclusively. My current place is a huge financial place and we pretty much have Dell Precisions, some latitudes and the rest Macbooks. We've got somewhere in the ballpark of 25,000 laptops deployed. While I don't service the desktops at my current place, I did in my previous 2 places and my experience with Dell was generally good. I found other brands like HP to be more crappy built. IBM thinkpads/Lenovo's were hit or miss. But I never had nearly as many of them as Dell's.

From a server perspective, current shop is pretty much Dell servers as well. In the past, I loved the old Compaq Proliants, which later got turned into HP ProLiants. But my last 2 jobs over the past 15 years or so, all have used Dell Poweredge servers.

If you were running a shop and needed say 1000 laptops and maybe 200 servers, what hardware would you be looking at?

Lamberto Vitali · Sep 20, 2023

pparks1 said:
I think generally if you buy a Dell, especially a smaller form factor model or laptop....clearly you wouldn't expect to be able to put in something like a GeForce 4090.

Dell make a lot of normal width tower cases.

pparks1 said:
You are likely to stick with whatever video card it had. Without upgrading a video card, you aren't likely to be trying to upgrade the power supply (which is usually where you run into the most proprietary issues).

I've upgraded Dells, I just use a proper bigger case and shift everything into it, then I can stick in anything I like.

pparks1 said:
Upgrading something like RAM or storage is going to be a non-issue on a dell, nothing crazy there.

Incorrect. They are very fussy about RAM.

pparks1 said:
So, you may upgrade a bit...but not likely the type of upgrading that an enthusiast who custom builds his computer is going to do. And even somebody like me who does build their own box, when it's time for an upgrade (3 to 5 ish years), I build a whole new rig. I don't re-use a single part from the old one. Rather have 2 working computers in the end. I would expect somebody with a dell would say after 3-5 years, maybe it's just time for a new machine and I'll donate this one to my kid, grandkid, local church, etc.

I've got 10 working computers.

When it's time for an upgrade, I don't have a grand to buy a whole new one, I upgrade the bit I need to, whatever's the bottleneck. The rest are made of scrap parts given to me or found cheap on Ebay. I've even got a Mac (spit!) laptop running Linux. I couldn't stand to use MacOS childish sshite and it just locked up with Windows, it was too complicated for it.

Lamberto Vitali · Sep 20, 2023

pparks1 said:
The vast majority of my experience with Dell's is from a work perspective. In the 3 places I have worked, we have all used Dell laptops almost exclusively. My current place is a huge financial place and we pretty much have Dell Precisions, some latitudes and the rest Macbooks. We've got somewhere in the ballpark of 25,000 laptops deployed. While I don't service the desktops at my current place, I did in my previous 2 places and my experience with Dell was generally good. I found other brands like HP to be more crappy built. IBM thinkpads/Lenovo's were hit or miss. But I never had nearly as many of them as Dell's.

From a server perspective, current shop is pretty much Dell servers as well. In the past, I loved the old Compaq Proliants, which later got turned into HP ProLiants. But my last 2 jobs over the past 15 years or so, all have used Dell Poweredge servers.

If you were running a shop and needed say 1000 laptops and maybe 200 servers, what hardware would you be looking at?

I'd avoid HP, Dell, Compaq, all the ones with bad reputations, then compare specs and prices and upgradability.

Not sure what you mean by shop though, that has a different meaning in US and UK. To me a shop is where you buy things. In the US it's a workshop. Why would either of those need 1200 computers?

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

Lamberto Vitali said:
Dell make a lot of normal width tower cases.

I've upgraded Dells, I just use a proper bigger case and shift everything into it, then I can stick in anything I like.

Incorrect. They are very fussy about RAM.

I've got 10 working computers.

When it's time for an upgrade, I don't have a grand to buy a whole new one, I upgrade the bit I need to, whatever's the bottleneck. The rest are made of scrap parts given to me or found cheap on Ebay. I've even got a Mac (spit!) laptop running Linux. I couldn't stand to use MacOS childish sshite and it just locked up with Windows, it was too complicated for it.

I know they make towers. And I'm sure some are using an XPS tower with a full size graphics card. I just feel a lot who buy a dell are buying lower end models to keep it budget friendly. I'd expect the higher end gaming folks to be looking at other prebuilts, Alienware, etc.

I never had much trouble with RAM upgrades on any Dell's I worked on. I mostly just bought RAM from Crucial for them. Nothing high-end or fancy.

Yeah, i get upgrading a little at a time. It's just not the way I ever do it. I find that if I want a new CPU, it needs a new mobo, and the mobo likely needs new RAM, etc. Only things I usually ever "ugprade" are storage and maybe add some RAM. On a rare occasion, I might change out a video card....but that much of a jump usually makes me want to upgrade the CPU and all the underlying components. For budget, I just usually start saving a year or so in advance and start putting money away for my new build. That way, when it's time to build a new box, I have the money saved up.

I have no qualms with Mac's. I'm not a fan of the iPhone however. There are some things Mac's do really well. I have the Mac basically to help support the people that I work with who are on a Mac. I recently bought a Mac Mini with the M1 chip as it's a fantastic little box for general purpose stuff that takes very, very little power. I'm not in the typically camp of "once you go mac, you never go back". I've bought a mac, then a pc, then another pc, then another mac. I like to play with all the stuff.

Lamberto Vitali · Sep 20, 2023

pparks1 said:
I know they make towers. And I'm sure some are using an XPS tower with a full size graphics card. I just feel a lot who buy a dell are buying lower end models to keep it budget friendly. I'd expect the higher end gaming folks to be looking at other prebuilts, Alienware, etc.

Dell are anything but budget. My work was shocked when I told them I could build a PC from parts for 30% less.

pparks1 said:
I never had much trouble with RAM upgrades on any Dell's I worked on. I mostly just bought RAM from Crucial for them. Nothing high-end or fancy.

But you had to find compatible RAM. Any other MB you just go by DDR number and size.

pparks1 said:
Yeah, i get upgrading a little at a time. It's just not the way I ever do it.

Then you're richer than me!

pparks1 said:
I find that if I want a new CPU,

Why do people write "that"? Try your sentence without. "I find if I want a new CPU". Flows much better.

pparks1 said:
it needs a new mobo, and the mobo likely needs new RAM, etc.

That does happen sometimes when I go past a major change in design. But I still keep the graphics, power, case, hard disk.

pparks1 said:
Only things I usually ever "ugprade" are storage and maybe add some RAM. On a rare occasion, I might change out a video card....but that much of a jump usually makes me want to upgrade the CPU and all the underlying components.

I change graphics card when a game is too slow. Games usually don't need a faster CPU.

pparks1 said:
For budget, I just usually start saving a year or so in advance and start putting money away for my new build.

Doesn't work for me. Savings go on some other important thing which crops up.

pparks1 said:
I have no qualms with Mac's.

They're ornaments, form over function, and double the price. And incompatible. And the OS looks like it was designed by and for a 6 year old.

pparks1 said:
I'm not a fan of the iPhone however.

For some reason people are buying them by the million. I got even more put off with them when I was visiting my Aunt. We were visiting a zoo and the electronic noticeboards were down, showing the feeding times. I walked back to the entrance and photographed it off the secretary's PC. I later met a woman who wanted to know the times, so I tried to bluetooth her the picture. Didn't work. I could see her phone, but it just didn't send, no error, just nothing. Then at the end of the holiday I tried to trade photos with my Aunt, and realised what the earlier problem was, because I had it again. You can't bluetooth files from a phone to an Iphone. That's Iphone, I will not capitalise in the middle of a word, it's just wrong. Then I got even more mad when I discovered they did it on purpose to prevent people buying music from anything but Itunes on another phone.

pparks1 said:
There are some things Mac's do really well. I have the Mac basically to help support the people that I work with who are on a Mac. I recently bought a Mac Mini with the M1 chip as it's a fantastic little box for general purpose stuff that takes very, very little power. I'm not in the typically camp of "once you go mac, you never go back". I've bought a mac, then a pc, then another pc, then another mac. I like to play with all the stuff.

There is nothing a Mac does better than a PC.

pparks1 · Sep 20, 2023

Lamberto Vitali said:
Dell are anything but budget. My work was shocked when I told them I could build a PC from parts for 30% less.

Generally speaking, they are not super expensive. At least the ones people buy in the stores, and such. I'm sure if you hunt all over you can find parts and get the price down a bit. I'm really particular on my builds, so I don't have the luxury of saving money anymore...but rather I get exactly what I want.

Lamberto Vitali said:
But you had to find compatible RAM. Any other MB you just go by DDR number and size.

Not exactly true. Ask people who have bought DDR5 RAM and discovered they were unaware of the HCL provided by their mobo manufacturer. Lots of recorded problems with memory incompatibilities with mobos...you can find these posts on this very forum.

Lamberto Vitali said:
Why do people write "that"? Try your sentence without. "I find if I want a new CPU". Flows much better.

Nitpick much. It's an internet forum, not an english class.

Lamberto Vitali said:
Doesn't work for me. Savings go on some other important thing which crops up.

Yeah, budgets are hard. If I have to dive into my savings fund for other things, I re-evaluate whether I really needed the computer upgrade anyway, or i just save longer. Like I said, i'm not saying my way is right, it's just the way that I do it.

Lamberto Vitali said:
They're ornaments, form over function, and double the price. And incompatible. And the OS looks like it was designed by and for a 6 year old.

Not all are double the price. if you really load up a Mac, you get into some dumb prices, I agree there. But for things like the Mac Mini and the Macbook air....it's quite a fair price. They have solid build quality, they have some of the best touchpad gesture support that exists, and their screens are always very nice......no cheap ass displays on a Mac.

Not sure what you mean by incompatible.

Lamberto Vitali said:
There is nothing a Mac does better than a PC.

Battery life and going to sleep and coming out of sleep immediately come to mind. Mac's have always kicked the PC's ass in the sleep department. From a software standpoint, Mac's really are the go to for music production purposes. And tons of graphics artists use Mac and have for used with various tools like photoshop and so forth.

Lamberto Vitali · Nov 15, 2023

pparks1 said:
Generally speaking, they are not super expensive. At least the ones people buy in the stores, and such. I'm sure if you hunt all over you can find parts and get the price down a bit. I'm really particular on my builds, so I don't have the luxury of saving money anymore...but rather I get exactly what I want.

No, I just bought parts and save about 30%. Dell are making money, so clearly if you do the build you're not paying the tech to assemble it.

pparks1 said:
Not exactly true. Ask people who have bought DDR5 RAM and discovered they were unaware of the HCL provided by their mobo manufacturer. Lots of recorded problems with memory incompatibilities with mobos...you can find these posts on this very forum.

Never happened to me.

pparks1 said:
Nitpick much. It's an internet forum, not an english class.

I'm the last person to ever pick up people on grammar. I hate it when people are too correct, like using "fewer". Why have fewer? I know apples are countable, you can just say less. To them I say, "I don't want fewer apples, I want severaler". If you need a word for less you need one for more.

As for "that", it's an extra word which is utterly meaningless. It can get really silly when someone uses it twice in a row, like "I can see that that was the right choice to make". Even one is super annoying, "I see that it's raining again", means exactly the same as "I see it's raining again".

pparks1 said:
Not all are double the price. if you really load up a Mac, you get into some dumb prices, I agree there. But for things like the Mac Mini and the Macbook air....it's quite a fair price. They have solid build quality, they have some of the best touchpad gesture support that exists, and their screens are always very nice......no cheap ass displays on a Mac.

Not sure what you mean by incompatible.

What world do you live in? Everything Apple does is different. I couldn't even bluetooth a photo to my Aunt's Iphone. They have different charging sockets. They use different file formats and different file allocation tables. I've worked for 11 years in two companies with Apple and Windows, half my time was spent trying to get people to be able to work together on the two platforms. By the time I'd left each place, they were all using Windows I made them see the light.

pparks1 said:
Battery life and going to sleep and coming out of sleep immediately come to mind.

Me and my Aunt went out for the day and both took about the same number of photos. My Motorola phone used 25% battery, her Iphone used 80%. Biggest gripe Iphone users have is battery life. M'colleagues were always asking to borrow a charger, in the middle of the day, they wouldn't last one working day! I can be on the phone for 10 hours straight with mine, with the screen on.

pparks1 said:
Mac's have always kicked the PC's ass in the sleep department. From a software standpoint, Mac's really are the go to for music production purposes. And tons of graphics artists use Mac and have for used with various tools like photoshop and so forth.

Photoshop works on Windows you know.

Cloning - wrong drive letter to boot?

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