Copying One Drive to Another

I have 2 drives. What I would like to do is copy my working C drive to my slave drive. My theory is that if my C drive should ever crash, all I have to do is change my boot sequence and Im back in business like nothing happened. I want it EXACTLY (a twin) of my C drive. My OS is WinXP. Can someone give me some direction as to how to do this? I would appreciate it greatly. Thanks!

 

Chawni,

You are correct, I have the same setup. The only thing you have to remember that you need to synchronies the 2 drives after you have installed windows on both drives.

Here is how I did it:
First, back up your drive "C" with windows backup. This comes with XP in "value added" folder on the CD.
Just place the file on drive "C ".
Then disconnect drive "C" and plug in drive "D" as the new drive "C" and do a basic XP installation on it, including MSBackup.
Plug "C" back in as "C" and plug "D" back in as "D ".
Now boot to "D" and do a restore to drive "D" from the backup file you placed on "C ".

Now you have a copy. And you don't have to buy Ghost or any other cloning software.

Have fun
Sven

 

chawni, what you are looking at is technically called mirroring. It could be done thru hardware if you have RAID controller on your motherboard (painless) otherwise you would have to do it thru cloning software & to remember to synchronise the 2 drives at regular intervals.