DRIVE COPY 4.0 

by Bill Hughes, LACS

My initial notion in the investigation of PowerQuest’s DRIVE COPY 4.0 was to install a backup on my primary drive. Wrong! This product is wonderful for backing up, but the backup must be on a separate drive.

This revelation certainly required a redirection in my plans. Here is a case for PowerQuest’s PARTITION MAGIC. One doesn't use PARTITION MAGIC every day, so I usually just install it, apply it, and uninstall it right away and probably never need to use it again on that computer. I planned to make a partition and use DRIVE COPY 4.0 to copy my primary drive onto a second drive, a logical drive, as a backup. So I reviewed PM’s manual and then installed PARTITION MAGIC on my machine. It went on just fine, and all appeared to be well. My latest version of PARTITION MAGIC clearly stated it would handle FAT32 partitions, so I marched ahead unarmed, alone, and unafraid.

My first hint of trouble was when the screen differed from the illustration significantly. The buttons were uniformly grayed out, and the bar was not labeled with the drive letter. Gee! That's odd! Try HELP. No help there. Try hitting the button anyhow. Nope. Nothing. What's the matter then? After many subtle and ingenious attempts to get the thing to give me a partition I tried rebooting into Safe Mode. That didn't work. But, after fooling around for a spell I was rewarded with a dialog box that said that while PARTITION MAGIC worked fine on FAT32 partitions, it wouldn't work on FAT32 partitions generated by Windows 98 (referred to as FAT32x partitions)! Frustrating!

I installed another hard drive. Easy enough except that the install disk for my new hard drive was infected with a virus! Well, never fear, you have not one, not two, but THREE antivirus programs on your computer, so nothing could get by all those defenses now, could it? Ah, you are forgetting something.

Remember a little program called End It All? When you do something like installing a new hard drive, it is recommended that you shut down all unnecessary programs running on your machine. So I ended it all. Yes, really! That included the antivirus programs. So as soon as I began the install, the virus entered my computer and wiped out the Root Directory of my hard drive. Wow! Now there was no way to access the hard drive. Even my dear friend, GOBACK, was disabled and could not be used to save me. PARTITION MAGIC could still see the drive, but it couldn't deal with the FAT32x, so the obvious work-round, setting up a second partition, which might be set up as the Primary Master was not possible. I was at an impasse.

Clearly, the first thing to do was to get rid of the virus. I dug out an old 386 machine and got it working after a little tinkering. It already had a virus program on it, so I slid the safety tab up on the install floppy so it could be accessed by the virus program and scanned. Yep! There was AntiCMOS-A, one of the more destructive and nasty viruses out there. It wipes out your root directory without warning and then stays around to infect whatever machine tries to run it. It isn't always triggered, which is why it survives; otherwise, it would be self-destructive. I have no idea of just what triggers it, but Norton’s F-PROT found it and cleared it out, and substituted a new, generic, root-directory on the floppy. I slid the write-protect tab back down immediately. (Ah, but, how did the virus get onto the install floppy in the first place? It had never been used, and it was write-protected, no? How did it get there? I don’t know.)

Now my install disk was back in action, but how do I use it in my computer? A start-up disk is a great thing when you have problems like this. Always have one on hand for the operating system (OS) you are using! The start-up disk (write protected, mind you, or it could just spread the virus further) got Windows 98SE up and running. I could find Drive C, but I could not open it. The anti-virus software that cleaned the hard drive of the virus also wiped out the boot section of the drive. And it offered no fix, i.e. a substitute Master Boot Record, as it did on the floppy. At this point, there was no access to the old hard drive. What to do?

I disconnected my main hard drive and set the jumpers on the new hard drive to make it a Master hard drive. Fortunately, the second hard drive could still be low-level formatted by the now cleaned install disk. I ran it and was rewarded with a hard drive ready to be partitioned and formatted. We are warned to be very wary of the DOS command, F-DISK, and with good reason. It works very well and is easy to use, but it does wipe out everything on the hard drive while it is establishing the partitions you desire. This does not happen when you first invoke the command, and so I disagree with the way the warning is generally given. F-Disk first brings up a menu with several options. Only one of these options will kill your data. One option allows you to look at the structure of your hard drive, and that is often useful and destroys nothing. So don't be afraid of F-DISK; just be afraid of what you can command it to do after you invoke it.

F-Disk allowed me to set-up FAT32X partitions on the second hard drive. I elected to set up a 2GB primary partition, which was set as "active." Then the remainder of the disk was set up as a secondary partition, which was then divided into several logical drives. This provided drives labeled C, D, E, F and G, thus making H the CD/ROM drive.

A reinstall of the OS in the primary, active partition, C, was easy enough, and I am back up and running, after a lot of effort. My data and applications are still on my first hard drive even though I cannot reach them. I strongly suspect that there will be a program around that will restore the boot section/root directory of my hard drive, and all I have to do is find it. Otherwise, it'll be necessary to learn machine language for this computer to re-establish the hard drive and reach my data. I certainly don't want to lose my data and re-format that hard drive, although it might come to that.

After all the trouble experienced so far, the actual test of DRIVE COPY 4.0 was anticlimactic. It was totally easy to use and carried you through the very few steps easily. You put the CD/ROM into your drive and follow the simple directions. Assorted screens come up to allow you various choices. Do you want to copy one drive to another? Would you prefer to copy just a partition? Where would you like to copy that partition? When you click on the answers, the program does the work for you, and rapidly.

I chose the longest, slowest transfer, with all the verifications, and my whole C: drive was copied in less than ten minutes. I cannot find anything wrong with it. The other copies will go as well. There was one surprise in the operation for me. It makes sense. When you copy the operating system to another partition, you must hide that partition or your computer may go bonkers trying to decide which partition to open up on. The simple answer to this is to make the backup partition HIDDEN. Then the computer won't see it. That's simple, but Hidden partitions do not have drive letters. So what would have been my G: partition is still there but is hidden with no drive letter and my CD/ROM drive which was previously designated H: is now designated as G:. The old G: drive no longer shows up on MY COMPUTER or anywhere else as far as I can see.

You find it with the DOS command F-DISK if you know it's there. Everybody is so scared of F-DISK that they don't even put it in beginners' manuals. You can also find the hidden logical drive by going back into DRIVE COPY 4.0; or you could find that hidden partition with PARTITION MAGIC. I'm not sure that you could find it at all using just your operating system. It is fascinating how important and useful our old friend DOS remains. While it is very difficult to find DOS at all with the newer Windows OS's, my friends assure me that DOS is there still alive and well.

For the benefit of our readers, it might be well to describe the subsequent recovery of the original hard drive (HD). You'll recall that a virus on the hard drive installation disk infected the boot sectors of both hard drives. I made the dumb mistake of disinfecting them as soon as it happened. The disinfections wiped out the MBR's (Master Boot Records) of both HD's. It was possible to do a low-level format on the new HD, followed by an F-Disk partitioning, followed by formatting the partitions. This put me back in business. But I still didn't have my old HD or my OS. I went ahead and installed an OS onto the first partition of the second HD and then used DRIVE COPY 4.0 to copy the OS onto one of the partitions, which had to be Hidden so that it would not cause confusion during boot-up. This all worked very well and the computer was back in business. There was an OS and there was a backup (in a hidden partition).

It lacked its Master Boot Record (MBR) and was therefore inaccessible and useless. Inquiries elicited only one answer, "Say goodbye to everything that's on the old HD, and go ahead and F-Disk it." This came from many and respected sources, including two techs at two different CompUSA stores. I was pretty well resigned.

Club member Cora Kamerman came to the rescue! She had heard me singing the blues at the Hardware SIG and did a little research to come up with the opinion that one of the Norton Utilities might restore the MBR. So I disconnected the new, operating HD and reconnected the old, now useless, one and booted up with a rescue disk. Norton Utilities’ Disk Doctor was invoked. Eureka! The drive was back in action in seconds! And it was seemingly as good as new. The new HD was rejumpered as a Slave and it ran fine.

There did appear a strange problem, however, with the original OS. Everything seemed cool, but when one tried to type in messages in Outlook Express, the screen just didn't respond! OE ran fine otherwise. To notify my friends that I was back on the air, I had to send my message in the SUBJECT: line. This limited my messages significantly but worked. It was easy enough to export my Address Book to Netscape, again at Cora's suggestion, and switch over to Netscape. She informs me that I can re-install OE after an adequate backup of its data. In the meanwhile, Netscape is working fine. I downloaded Eudora and Opera just to be on the safe side, and they work great too. I can especially recommend the new, free, version of Opera.

A new version of OE was released, v. 6.01, and I installed it. It is really good. It runs fast. There is one small quirk I have yet to resolve: When you open a message, it comes up in a small window. There ought to be an option or preference somewhere, but it is yet to appear.

Once you have identified the requirement for it, DRIVE COPY 4.0 is a really smooth, easy tool to add to your repertoire, and I can recommend it most heartily. List price: $50. (Special lower prices are available for user group members at Gene Barlow’s website, www.ugr.com.) POWER QUEST Corporation, P. O. Box 1911, Orem, Utah 84059-1911. Telephone: (801) 437-8900. FAX: (801) 226-8941. www.powerquest.com