Cloning/Imaging Industrial PC's

[aidamcg]

Hi

This is not a purely PLC related question but I would like to know if anyone has ideas on how I image non networked computers.
I have 10 machines that have Beckhoff PLC's. In the past 4 months 3 of the computers that run the twincat software for them have had hard drive failures. I am wondering if anyone out there knows of a cost effective way of imaging/cloning the hard drives so I can easily replace the hard drive if one fails in the future. I worked for a company in the past and they used norton ghost but all of these computers would have been networked which made the task of replacing a hard drive fairly easy. The problem I have now is that the computers are not networked but they have network hardware but they dont have USB ports. What kind of software and hardware would I need to carry out this task.Any comments ideas greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Aidan

 

[keithkyll]

Install the new drive as a second hard drive.
Set the jumpers on the new drive as a slave, and install it as the second drive. Temporarily remove the CDROM if necessary (install Norton Ghost on the primary HD first).
Ghost will do the rest.
After cloning, reset the jumpers for a primary drive, and test it by rebooting the system.

 

[zawthet]

Hi,

I have tried out Norton Ghost to save the harddrive image of the PC running with TwinCAT before. But I have a problem when I replace the new harddrive with image that I saved in Ghost.

However, if you save your image with the software from PowerQuest (I forgot the name of software), it can work.

 

[aidamcg]

Keith

I will give that a go and see how I get on.

Thanks

Aidan

 

[George Graziano]

I use to use ghost all the time. I would tell it to save to external hard drive ( search for Kanguru hard drive). I had a USB end and a parallel port end.

George

 

[rsdoran]

PowerQuest was bought by Norton, they had DriveCopy and DriveImage.

I have Norton Ghost 10.0 and it is not as simple as they claim, nowhere near as simple as the DriveCopy days. In some cases you may need to use the Recovery feature to do some things so you will need a CD that you can boot too.

Study the situation before you make a decision.

 

[AMAZINGAHMED]

If you're running Windows NT or 2000 server or 2003 server or any other operating system that supports RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) then you'll face no problem.

You'll install a second hard drive and make it a mirror of the first one, thus your PC will be fault tolerent.
If it happens that any one of them fails then the other will continue to work as nothing had happened and then you can replace the corrupted hard drive without even shutting down the PC.

 

[Mylo]

Try using Vm WARE Convertor and convert the pc to a virtual machine. You can then check remotely operation of software etcetc check out www.vmware.com

BTW all free downloads !!!!!!!!