Re: Norton Ghost type program for IIgs?

[mitch2gs@hotmail.com (Mitchell Spector)]

"Jason Whorton" <jason at microxl.com> wrote:

>Hello.  Is there a program for the IIgs that is similar to Norton Ghost for
>the PC?  If you are not familiar with Norton Ghost, it allows a disk to disk
>copy, or a partition to partition copy.  It is run from a DOS bootable
>floppy disk  I read my Apple High-Speed SCSI Card manual, and it states that
>the utility disk can back it up to floppies.  It didn't mention two hard
>drives.  I am guessing that would have been insanely expensive ten years
>ago.  I am slowly but surely getting my IIgs system up and going.  When I do
>get it up and going, one thing I want is to have two seperate hard disk
>drives.  I want the second one to be an exact copy of the first one in case
>the hard drive dies.  Thanks to everyone who has posted helpful information
>whether for me or others.  It helps all of us.

    I can think of at least two or three ways of accomplishing this. The
first would be to use Ninjaforce's Asimov 2.0 program. It can create
a image copy of an entire partition (stored as a '2MG' file) then restore
a byte for byte copy onto the same or a new partition. Typically you'll
require an HFS partition to store the '2MG' image file, as it'll exceed 
the file limit size for ProDOS (16 MB).

    The second method would be to use GSTape to make an image
copy, however this requires you have a SCSI tape drive and media.
I've made backup copies of all my partitions this way, though I don't
generally trust magnetic tape so I plan to burn 2MG images (created
with Asimov) to CDR or CDRW's using my PC. I can at least read
the CDR's on the IIgs side for restoring partitions.

    Finally, and I may have the ONLY remaining copy of it, is a plug-in
ROM replacement for the RamFAST controller that does very fast 
SCSI-to-SCSI partition copies. It was used by TMS Peripherals to
make mass copies of hardrives they sold (with the OS and IIgs
shareware pre-installed). If I can get ahold of an EPROM burner
I'd be glad to share copies of it, or at least dump a copy to disk.

Mitchell Spector