Hard Drive Cloning

Does anyone happen to have any suggestions on doing a hard drive clone or exact copy on Windows XP...I've tried a few software titles (Drive Copy and Norton Ghost) but none seems to work exactly right and that's money down the drain...I even tried the "X-copy" command in DOS and it will "sort-of" work but not eveything is copied it seems...after the copy, I tried to boot form the external hard drive and it wouldn't....and if I go to properties and look at the size of the files, they're are not the same size. What I want to do is copy my entire contents of my hard drive and make it bootable so I can have it as a back-up in case of failure. I will be trying to do this on a external USB hard drive. I would appreciate any help or suggetions anyone can give me. Right now I am running out of choices....I'm a little leary of buying new software now due to my problems with the others and there's not a lot out there compatable with Windows XP.

 

I have done this many times with DriveImage. But DI does not support USB drives presently. You can still create an image of your system drive in another partition and copy that to an external USB drive.

Xcopy won't work with NTFS.

You may not be able to boot from an external drive unless your BIOS supports it. Double-check if you are not positive about your system.

 

Ghost will clone a drive, and allow a restore from a USB drive.
The BIOS will determine if you can boot from USB or not (I doubt it).

 

reboot---
Have you used both Ghost and DI? It has been years since I used Ghost and I'm sure it has changed a lot.

Essentially the same thing or do you think one is significantly better than the other?

I've gotten used to DI and unless there is a big difference, I'll stick with what I know .

 

Yes, I can boot from quite a few USB devices....I have a new motherboard...Gigabyte GA-SINXP1394...it pretty good so far...

 

I have used both, and it's only because I've been using Ghost for so long, that I stick with it. DI works as good, with a fancier GUI.
Use whatever makes you comfortable.

 

Thanks. I thought as much.

 

Hi s1wheel4,
I am using Ghost as it was furnished with Norton System Works 2003 Pro to back up my main hard drive to a USB 2.0 external hard drive. I had NSW 2002 Pro but it's Ghost didn't support USB external drives, or so they so noted on their web site.
When I create a back up, it is smaller in file size than the main hard drive because I think there is some compression.
I am just using the external drive for back up right now. I have never tried to boot from it or restore my hard drive because I haven't found it necessary yet.
Good luck.