BUDGET BACKUP
Adding backup hard drives via a removable tray By Arthur R. Kopp 01/18/07
This outline is intended to help users who have a certain amount of "do it yourself" capabilities and interest in PC hardware. It is impossible to include a large amount of detail because of the variety of hardware already existing on users machines. Also, there is a wide variety of available hardware and BIOS firmware. I'm going to go on the assumption that you have a reasonably modern Windows 2000 or XP machine that isn't already loaded with drives, so you have room to add a drive internally. I also assume you may have only two drives (one hard drive and one CD ROM drive)and one primary drive cable, or that your existing secondary drive cable just has one drive currently for a total of three drives currently.

Briefly, my approach has been to connect system backup drives as secondary masters and use XXCLONE to file clone them as alternate bootable system drives. I use only IDE drives, and so far I've only used left over drives from older PCs that I've abandoned for my backups. I check them for reliability using free utilities available from drive vendors at their web sites. The drives range in size from 2 gig (for minor data backup) to 12 gig for system cloning. I never have more than just a few gig on my main system partition to back up totally. Since I also have used 80 conductor EIDE ribbon cables on hand, my only purchases have been of removable drive trays. Suitable trays with adequate cooling vents, a fan, and locking key can be obtained from computer supply stores for just $15 or so (US). Let's first take a look at a typical removable drive tray. They have handles on the front which are used to pull out the drive carriage within when the key is in the OFF position. They fit in a unused CD ROM drive space.

Just avoid bare bones trays which lack the features mentioned above. It's important to have adequate cooling, and it's also important to have the locking key which also acts as a power on-off switch for the drive. The drive should normally be unpowered if it's left in the tray so that it is inaccessable to malware. You can simply pull the drive carriage out and keep your system backup drive sitting on a shelf, only to be used in emergencies or for rare reclones. Never power the drive on-off while the machine is powered up. Let's next take a look at a carriage after a drive has been installed in the carriage:

Here's the back of a typical IDE hard drive

Note the small white jumper. IDE drives will have instructions printed on them for where to place the jumper when the drive is to be a master. Sometimes there's a "master with slave present" option which must be taken into account. I'll get into that later. I use a small needle nose pliers to pull and insert jumpers. I suppose a ordinary pair of tweezers would work, and some people thread a string through the hole in the jumpers to pull them.

The cable you will be using is a secondary drive cable, identical to the primary drive cable. Make sure to use a 80 wire EIDE ribbon cable. Half the wires are ground wires. Connector A in the pic plugs into the motherboard right next to the primary drive cable.

This pic shows the typical placement of the primary and secondary ide connectors right next to each other on a motherboard without the cables plugged in. In this case, they happen to be green and white. The smaller black connector is for a floppy drive cable.

Be careful to orient the secondary cable the same way as the primary cable. Pin 1 is identified by a red cable wire. The red wire also orients you to how to plug the master connector at the other end into the 40 pin connector at the rear of the removable drive tray. Looking at the back of the tray, pin 1 is normally on your right, facing the power connector. Don't forget to plug in the four wire DC power connector to the removable drive as well. It will be keyed so you can't insert it incorrectly.

Now, getting back to the possible issue of the drive jumper and a slave drive on your secondary cable. You may or may not currently have another drive to connect in as a slave. So handle the drive jumper option accordingly, remembering that if you do add or delete a slave you will have to change the drive jumper accordingly.

Once you have the hardware installed, you have the issue of drive preparation. In my case, using used drives already formatted FAT32, no prep has been required. I use FAT 32 with Windows 2000. If you wish, Windows will convert the file system to NTFS. You simply highlight the target drive in Windows Explorer and select format from the menu, which leads to the file system option. I'll not get into preparation of new drives here since that kind of information is readily available from many sources, and it goes beyond my purposes in this article.

The free version of XXCLONE does not offer incremental cloning where you can copy only files which require updating or new additions. Thus, every time it is used it copies all files. This is not only time consuming, but you have to consider the drive wear issue if this is done often. I recommend purchasing XXCLONE if you want to back up your system drive often. The use of XXCLONE is straightforward. The first time you clone your backup drive, be sure to use the Cool Tools menu and make your drive bootable. Only check the first two options, to set the boot and mbr sectors. Ignore the option to copy boot.ini. After creating the bootable cloned backup of your system, you can check it out in a couple of ways. One way is to temporarily change the boot sequence in the BIOS. Instead of booting from HDD0 (the primary master) set the BIOS to boot from HDD1 (the secondary master) instead. Another way is to pull the power connector from the main drive, forcing the system to boot from your backup drive as the last available alternate boot device. This also might require a BIOS setting to "boot from other devices" or some such description. The latter method where the main drive is unpowered is the most positive method since you know that your backup system is entirely independent of any files on your main drive when checked in this way. Setting the BIOS to boot from HDD1 affords a method of restoring your main system drive partition from backup. The backup drive will then have drive letter C:\ and the main drive partition will have some other drive letter. Simply use XXCLONE with C:\ as the source. Note that XXCOPY free version is suitable for incremental backups and cloning of data. It's just not suitable for system cloning on Win 2K and XP because it can't copy locked system files (but see appendix below). It is, however, suitable for cloning system volumes on Win 9X/ME. There are instructions at the XXCOPY web site on how to make the backup drive bootable for Win 9X/ME users.

If you have difficulties following my outline, don't hesitate to drop me a email. I'll do what I can to help, and also improve this article based on such feedback. Click here to write

Appendix
1. I've used a alternate operating system method to get around the problem of XXCOPY not being able to copy locked files. I've XXCLONEed my first partition to a second partition and arranged a dual boot. I can then boot to the second partition and use XXCOPY to clone a backup of the first partition. This goes very quickly even for cloning a freshly formatted drive. However, the required reboots make this approach unattractive, and on Win 2000 this can lead to the lockout problem below.

2. Here's a Win 2K problem that can arise with multiple partitions, which I've seen happen when trying out the backup drive. Murray's solution worked for me: Unable to log in This is actually a bug in Win 2K since the error message instructs you to go into Control Panel, etc., before the desktop is available ... resulting in being locked out of the operating system. Just say "no" to multi-booting with Win 2K if you plan to do ghosting or cloning :)

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