Request for Question Clarification by
sublime1-ga
on
08 Sep 2005 17:45 PDT
Hi nautico...
Norton Ghost is very highly regarded, and you really can't go
wrong with it. Another program with lots of awards is Acronis
True Image 8.0, which seems to offer about the same utility,
and is slightly cheaper:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/
Another option might be even cheaper. If your external drive
is larger than the disk on which Windows is installed, it
may come with a utility that allows you to copy your entire
drive to the backup drive, including Windows system files
which are in use, though it requires a re-boot to complete
the process.
That's the route I went. I have an 80GB Western Digital HD
on my PC. I just bought a second WD 80GB drive and slaved
it to my main drive. Western Digital provides a utility
called Data Lifeguard Tools 11 for Windows, which you can
download from their site, which makes an exact duplicate of
your current drive on the slaved drive, from Windows.
I'm not sure if it would work with a non-Western Digital
external drive, but it's worth a try:
http://support.wdc.com/download/
Whatever you use, you should check to make sure your external
drive is formatted in NTFS, vs FAT32. Many external drives
come formatted in FAT32 by default, and this may cause errors
if you're backing up Windows 2000 or XP. If you're using 98,
FAT32 is fine.
Let me know where this takes you...
sublime1-ga
