Thanks to Bender, Earle Horton, Tyro, Richard Urban, John Barnett, Richie,
RalfG, Olfart, John, and to you all in this thread for helping me.
I'm going to try 2 approaches: cloning and doing a complete Backup with the
Vista tool (as not always I'll have HDD failure or irreversible crashes)
My PC has an Asus P5K Premium Black Pearl Edition mother board with an Intel
Core Extreme Q6850/3GHz and 4.00GB of RAM.
I have no problem to reinstall Vista itself as I have the Vista Ultimate
original DVD (not OEM), but it is time consuming to re install all suites
and programs. I believe that the best way will be to have my entire "C"
drive cloned so I can switch HDDs without need to reinstall everything
again.
I have just 55GB of used space on my "C" volume and I'd like to use my 2
SATA Drive Cartridge System (
http://tinyurl.com/a6jya2) so I can swap HDD
easily. My doubt is that my "C" drive consists of 2 "Western Digital
Raptor 150GB/10.000RPM" configured as RAID-0 .
My doubt is: can I copy it to a single Seagate SATA 750GB, even when they
are different sizes and when one is RAID and the other single drive?
I already have a couple of Seagate 750 GB and I don't want to buy 2 WD
Raptors unless it's absolutely necessary.
My idea is to always have and exact copy of my "C" on the Seagate 750 just
to keep all my programs and settings duplicate. If the Raptors crash, I'd
copy all programs/files from the Seaate to the Raptor's RAID-0 (after having
them reformatted and checked) as they are faster drives.
If it's not a fatal crash, I will try performing a Full Backup with the
Vista built-in program as Bender suggest me. Honestly, I have not try it
lately as in the past I've been unsuccessful when trying to recover from
backup images performed with Norton and others.
I'll take a look at Casper (thanks Olfart) and to Norton Ghost as Earle
suggests, but probably the Acronis True Image would be the easiest for me as
Richard says that it can make an exact copy of you my hard drive and then
disconnect the target.
Question = will the Acronis cloned volume drive letter be "C" or it must be
fixed later?
This and the HDDs size difference are the only issues left for me then.
Thanks again.
Terence