How to Clone a PS2 Hard Drive

[yld-bros.1]

There seems to be so many questions on how to do this, I figured a quick little guide might be useful.

I take absolutley no responsibility if you somehow manage to screw up your hard drive! Proceed at your own risk!

Before we start, make sure that the hard drive that is going to be cloned is fully functioning and has everything you want on it.

You will need a working copy of Norton Ghost, at least that is what I used, so other programs may work, but I have no experience with them.

Also make sure that the drive you are copying to is empty/formatted and at least the same size. It is okay if it is bigger.


Instructions

Read this entire tutorial before you begin!

1) Make a boot disk using Norton Ghost 2004
2) Set the jumpers on the hard drive you want cloned to master and set the jumpers on the blank hard drive to slave. Make sure that they are on the same IDE channel.(for simplicities sake)
4) Make sure that the computers BIOS is set to boot from the floppy first. Then boot up the computer using the Norton Ghost boot disk.
5) Once the program loads exit the program!
6) You will be taken to a DOS prompt where you will need to type "ghost /ir" This will allow ghost to copy a drive bit for bit, and this is what you want.
7) When ghost loads up, go to the menu and select "disk", and then "to disk"
8) Select the original hard drive as the source. If you jumpered it as master it will be selected by default.
9) Select the blank hard drive as the destination.
10) Let it do it's thang, depending on your machine it may be faster or slower. On my machine it takes about 45 -50 minutes to clone a 120gb hard drive.
11) Once it has finished, shut down the computer and remove the PS2 hard drives and recconnect the computer's hard drives.
12) Place the jumper on the PS2 hard drive to master.
13) You need only to pop your new PS2 hard drive into the network adapter and you are up and running.

MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHICH HARD DRIVE IS WHICH WHEN YOU GO TO CLONE THEM. BE CAREFUL BECAUSE YOU CAN DESTROY THE ORIGINAL HARD DRIVE IF YOU ARE NOT CAREFUL.

Intersting notes -
Older versions of Norton Ghost work, but instead of typing "ghost /ir", you need to type "ghostpe /ir".

Say you have an 80 gig hard drive and you want to clone it to a 120 gig hard drive. You can follow this guide and it will put whatever was on the 80 gig hard drive onto the 120, but it will also show that you have another 30 - 40 gigs open. (I think) This means that the PS2 doesn't really format the hard drive, it just needs that original boot folder to access the hard drive.

I also don't have an original PS2 hard drive to clone, but I am curious to see if cloning an original to another hard drive would give online capabilities. Or at least have the hard drive show up in the browser. If anyone can answer, drop a note.

Hope this helps someone! Sorry so ugly, my first tut!

[spedmetal]

Good idea useing Ghost. Never thought about that.

[dreamcaster911]

Do I have to remove the computer HD before putting the ps2 and blank HD into the comp?

[yld-bros.1]

yes, find the IDE cable with your computer's hard drive. Unplug your hard drive(s) and then plug in the PS2 drive and the blank drive. The PS2 drive should be plugged in to the end of the IDE cable and the blank should be in the middle. Hope this clarifies things a little.

[dreamcaster911]

cool.. thanks a lot

[FourDoor]

Sweet... thanks for the tut. I'll have to give this a shot later.

[b081]

An alternative approach would be to manually extract games from the HD Loader partitions (there are enough Windowz tools already) and then to install games to the second HDD. I've heard some tools supports batch installs, but I think there aint batch extracts yet, however, that is not a problem that could not be solved by using CYGWIN and a bunch of shell scripts.

[lostinnil]

Before I try this, I wish I still have a floppy disc drive...

[FourDoor]

I thought HDL_DUMB or one of other gui interfaces allowed ps2 hdd to ps2 hdd transfer for specific games. Anyone have any insight on that?

[yld-bros.1]

lostinnil: I don't have a floppy drive in the computer I'm using to clone either. I had to use another computer to make a floppy boot disc, then used nero to create a cd boot disc. It was a pain in the ass, but now that it is all setup, it's all good.

FourDoor: I'm sure there are many different ways to accomplish this task, but for me, this was the quickest and easiet way I could find. Like I say, 45 minutes to clone a 120gb hard drive is pretty damn fast. But whatever works!