[markp]

I have always made clones of my CNC machine hard drives as soon as I get them in house. I recently acquired an 1100 series 3 and searched around regarding cloning the hard drive. I see no indication anywhere online that anyone has ever tried this. Anyone know if there's some reason for this? I haven't opened up the path pilot case yet, does anyone know what type of drive these controllers have? My duplicator can copy bit for bit anything from 80s IDE drives to the latest SSD drives but maybe its disk on chip like the B port cnc lathes?

I do have a 90s Hiit 8 cnc lathe with an Siemens 840c control and the drive actually had some Siemens copy protection that made the original drive un bootable after it was duplicated. I had to send the non booting clone to a Siemens tech I know to "rearrange" it, then it would boot and allow copies to be made.

[metalmayhem]

easiest thing would be to copy and back up the pathpilot folder and buy a pathpilot installer from tormach . For the most part backup isn't all that necessary unless you change your configs . The usb installer loads all the settings needed to run off a fresh install

[markp]

No, the easiest thing is to pop a drive into a duplicator and press "clone". I have the install CDs but any install is a pain compared to a hardware based drive duplicator. Also, if the drive dies, you're up and running in 10 min. Anyway, Ill give it a try and report back!

[vmax549]

It would be a GREAT idea to be able to CLONE your HD from PP. Replacing the PC is simple replicating all the software and settings is not.
A backup drive would be wonderful to have.

(;-) TP

[metalmayhem]

Also, if the drive dies, you're up and running in 10 min. Anyway,!

A fresh install takes roughly the same period of time , but I understand where your coming from
I'm pretty sure you can download clonezilla for the linux os

[markp]

I use a 4 bay star tech hardware based bit for bit duplicator. These are more reliable than any of the software based solutions for basic cloning. Dont ask me how I know!

[sagreen]

I have always made clones of my CNC machine hard drives as soon as I get them in house. I recently acquired an 1100 series 3 and searched around regarding cloning the hard drive. I see no indication anywhere online that anyone has ever tried this. Anyone know if there's some reason for this? I haven't opened up the path pilot case yet, does anyone know what type of drive these controllers have? My duplicator can copy bit for bit anything from 80s IDE drives to the latest SSD drives but maybe its disk on chip like the B port cnc lathes?

I do have a 90s Hiit 8 cnc lathe with an Siemens 840c control and the drive actually had some Siemens copy protection that made the original drive un bootable after it was duplicated. I had to send the non booting clone to a Siemens tech I know to "rearrange" it, then it would boot and allow copies to be made.

I use a program called Rescuezilla https://rescuezilla.com/

I clone PathPilot hard drives all the time with this software.

Scott...

[Bob La Londe]

Old post I know, but a drive duplicator worked for better for me than CloneZilla.

No I have not duplicated a PathPilot drive, but I did recently duplicate a windows drive with Mach 3. I have two nearly identical machines in the shop (besides my Tormach) running Mach 3. The drive in one of them died. I cloned the drive using an Orico drive bay with hardware clone capability. I dropped the duplicate drive in the machine with the bad drive, and it booted right up. Had one Windows driver update for no good reason. rebooted and was up and running. That fast really. The only thing time consuming I had to do since they have different tool racks was remeasure and re-enter the tools in the tool table. That's something I would have had to do with a ground up install and configuration as well.

I actually found this thread because I am thinking about cloning the drive in my PathPilot machine driving the 1100S3 in my shop. I wanted to see if there was any tricks or snafus to it. In the example above the computers running both of those Windows/Mach3 machines were basically identical. There are some issues with the PC running PathPilot and I was thinking a clone job to a new PC and keep the old PC as a backup might be in order, but the hardware differences of the PC could be an issue I suppose.

Of course I am also running some not Tormach equipment, and I am sure I don't remember all the HAL edits I had to do for it. I do remember it was better to make the mods in the BASE file rather than the machine specific files.

So how did your CLONE job go?