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Physical copiers typically FDISK and FORMAT as they go, so they are a good choice for large-scale projects that use identical drives on all units, eliminating a point of intervention. Finally, physical copying is the only method available when duplicating NTFS drives or Unix-based drives. Currently, logical copy methods support only FAT.

LBA and CHS Normal hard drive logical block addressing (LBA) versus cylinder, head and sector (CHS) cautions are in effect no matter which method you use. For exam ple, you can't specify a drive of more than 1,024 cylinders on a BIOS that doesn't support LBA, even if the CMOS autodetects it or permits you to manually enter it. If you do, you're asking for trouble (see "Cylinder, Head and Sector [CHS] BIOS" diagram at right).

Although LBA is powerful and lets you use a drive with more than 1,024 cylinders, it's a one-way trip. Once you format a drive with LBA, you can't return or back out of your install without dropping the drive's partition, re-FDISKing and FORMATting (see "Logical Block Addressing" diagram on page 106). Our rule of thumb is when duplicating both LBA and CHS drives, use an LBA BIOS that lets you specify how to treat a particular drive as LBA or CHS in the CMOS.

You probably don't want to use a physical image as a master for a mix of LBA and CHS machines, because a physical image copies the partition table with its associated "start" and "end" parameters. This is not a good idea if you try to use an LBA image on a CHS machine, since the LBA numbe rs will point to the wrong cylinders on a CHS BIOS, making it difficult to load programs--or even boot!

Unfortunately, DOS-based FDISK won't tell you whether a disk is formatted in CHS or LBA. Labeling these drives is a good idea. We typically label drives with the image name, a date, and CHS or LBA.

The products we tested will perform the basic job of copying a hard drive to either an image file on the network or another hard drive, and that's all you need for the mission of rolling out identical hard drives in any given workgroup.

HDCP: FAT Yet Slim The DOS-based HDCP is a logical FAT-only copier, the equivalent of the Unix dd command on steroids. Consequently, you must first FDISK and FORMAT destination drives, which makes it best-suited for low-volume Windows95, FAT-based NT or DOS-based projects. It is not appropriate for NTFS, High Performance File System (HPFS) or Unix projects. HDCP is a relatively fast copier, however, and shines when restoring images from a file server. We found HDCP simple to use. It has the option of being menu-driven or command line-driven for batch operation. It only does one thing, simple FAT copies, but it does them well.

HDCP is available through shareware at your neighborhood bulletin board service (BBS) or SIMTEL MS-DOS mirror. You can obtain it by searching for "HDCP" at www.shareware.com. HDCP will copy only between different size drives in the registered version.

Dupe Does Windows Corporate Systems Center's (CSC) Dupe-IT DOS version is unusually slow, but the Windows95 version is appreciably faster--even when duplicating three physical targets at once. Despite Win95's gain in speed, it is a physical copier only. CSC claims that the 32-bit version of the software also will run under NT, but we had trouble making source or target drives show up at all.

For environments performing many in-house duplications, this product is definitely a winner. Build a machine with two IDE controll ers, run external cables, and you're ready to crank out a number of duplicated drives.

Dupe-IT is available on the Web at corpsys.com for $89 per copy. Be careful not to confuse Dupe-IT with CSC's CD-ROM duplicator, also called Dupe-IT.

Ghost's Host Costs the Most Binary Research's Ghost seems to have priced itself right out of the market. But Ghost's licensing is totally different than its competition: Instead of charging you a per-software license, it bases its pricing on the number of workstations duplicated with Ghost. Pricing begins at $250 for a 25-workstation, single-image license pack from Innovative Software, Binary Research's World Wide Distributor.

Perhaps this pricing scheme makes more sense when you consider that Ghost, unlike HDCP or Dupe-IT, can make any workstation into an "image server" via NetBIOS. Depending on the licensing you purchase, Ghost can serve up a single dupe at a time or multiple ones. In some sense, you are paying for a stripped-down NOS and the associated cl ient seats built right into the software, even when using the "single-image" copy. Integrators get a discount, but still must pay what amounts to a hard drive royalty for every unit shipped or for every hard drive duplica ted.

Pricing aside, the great thing about Ghost is that it is both a physical and logical disk copier. If the drive is FAT, it does a logical copy of it and FDISKs and FORMATs the destination drive on the fly as appropriate. This is a very clever innovation and a huge time-saver.

You can download a trial version of Ghost from www.ghostsoft.com.

Ready, Set ... Clone Before ripping open the duplicator package, you'll have to do some social engineering. You will need to convince users not to treat a local hard drive as permanent storage. Instead, users should place all critical files on a network drive.

You will probably want to put a copy of the Windows95 or Windows NT distribution on your master drive. This is v ery worthwhile, especially for end workstations without a CD-ROM drive. Particularly in departments that have two or more machine types, this will let you reconfigure master images very quickly, without hunting for a CD-ROM or fumbling through floppies.

Finally, make sure that the image you are about to duplicate is a good one. And remember to run SCANDISK on your master drive before duplicating it--you don't want to propagate errors in the file table to every machine you duplicate.

Jonathan Feldman is the technical systems manager for Chatham County in Savannah, Ga. He can be reached at jonathan@co.chatham.ga.us.