Cloning A Hard Drive

Since XP requires after market software to backup the HD I thought another solution might be to add a second HD and then just synch it once in a while with the master for the backup. My question is whether or not I can use a larger drive than what I have now (40 Gig) to do this or if it needs to be the same size. If I could go to something larger I would like to go to a drive at least twice as large then partition it so I could have a dual boot drive with linux on the second partition. One partition would be the 40 Gig to back up the master with a larger partition to install linux. Anyone have any idea if this is doable? I'm taking a linux class now and it would be great to have it bootable on my system for school. Thanks much.

 

No problem with the 2nd drive being larger.

The program to do the backup is PowerQuest Drive Image.

It will copy the 1st drive to the second or it will create a compressed image. I use the Image and store it on another HD.

Mike