Cold backup of System SATA disk?

[asnowfall]

Just now I finished installing WindowsXP 64-bit OS and few important
applications on my SATA disk of 250gb size.
I would like to make copy of this system disk using following
procedure.
1) Remove the SATA system disk, DISK1, from source machine and load it
to an external USB enclosure.
2) Connect USB enclosure to 2nd machine
3) Copy the contents of DISK1 to extra disk.

Is this procedure correct? This might sound laborious, but I do not
mind because it is home PC and downtime is not a factor.

Though the size of DISK1 is 250gb, space being used is just 20GB; so
should the size of destination disk be 250gb?

Thanks
Ramesh

 

[createwindow]

Dear Ramesh,

If you need to ever restore the XP copy it will be problematic for a
number of reasons (that I won't go into right now). A better way is to
"image" or "Clone" your system drive using a good imaging program like
Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image or the free Seagate disk wizard (OEM
Acronis anyhow) - which you can download from seagate.com for free.

CreateWindow
http://mymessagetaker.com
The while-you-were-out message program you have been looking for!

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Just now I finished installing WindowsXP 64-bit OS and few important
applications on my SATA disk of 250gb size.
I would like to make copy of this system disk using following
procedure.
1) Remove the SATA system disk, DISK1, from source machine and load it
to an external USB enclosure.
2) Connect USB enclosure to 2nd machine
3) Copy the contents of DISK1 to extra disk.

Is this procedure correct? This might sound laborious, but I do not
mind because it is home PC and downtime is not a factor.

Though the size of DISK1 is 250gb, space being used is just 20GB; so
should the size of destination disk be 250gb?

Thanks
Ramesh

Yes, you can do this provided that you follow a few rules:
- You must partition and format Disk1 on some WinXP system.
- The target partition must be a primary partition.
- If the target partition is not the first partition then you may
have to adjust boot.ini accordingly.
- If you want this disk to be a boot disk then the target
partition must be active.
- You must copy all hidden files.
- You must copy all ACLs. Both xcopy.exe and robocopy.exe
have switches for this.
- If you have connected Disk1 to your machine before then
you may get a looping logon problem (which can be resolved!).

As CreateWindow suggested, an imaging program may be an
easier way to go about this, unless you have a fair amount of
experience in manipulating sytem partitions. The image file it
creates would also be much easier to handle than a whole
system partition.

 

[asnowfall]

I will use Seagate's tool, it being free is what I wanted.

Regards,
Ramesh