Create a bootable backup

[Mark]

I' had my Dell 8300 with XP Home for months and set up a lot of programs. I
am about to upgrade the drive but don't want to do full reinstall. Dell
puts a DellUtility partition at the start of the drive (just 41MB) but when
I try to use WesternDigitals utility to duplicate the drive, it doesn't seem
to find the first partition. The resulting copy from DOS or Windows
(neither one) will boot. I know I can just start over but what a pain
after configuring XP the way I like it and installing all our software.

Anyone have simple solutions to migrate everything to a bootable drive?

I plan to keep the old drive as an emergency recovery disk. Seems Microsoft
recommends you keep a full backup and recovery solution, but I can't find a
recommendation for XP Home users.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I' had my Dell 8300 with XP Home for months and set up a lot of programs. I
am about to upgrade the drive but don't want to do full reinstall. Dell
puts a DellUtility partition at the start of the drive (just 41MB) but when
I try to use WesternDigitals utility to duplicate the drive, it doesn't seem
to find the first partition. The resulting copy from DOS or Windows
(neither one) will boot. I know I can just start over but what a pain
after configuring XP the way I like it and installing all our software.

Anyone have simple solutions to migrate everything to a bootable drive?

I plan to keep the old drive as an emergency recovery disk. Seems Microsoft
recommends you keep a full backup and recovery solution, but I can't find a
recommendation for XP Home users.

There are several tools to do this: Acronis TrueImage, PowerQuest
DriveImage or Norton Ghost come to the mind.

 

[Mark]

Thanks Pegasys for the prompt response. I have seen positive comments about
using the tools you mention to clone a harddrive (copied below), but could
not confirm they address the problem of the 41 Mb DellUtility diagnostic
partition being the first partition and still providing a bootable harddrive
with XP Home.

For years I have upgraded using Western Digital DataLifeguard to copy one
bootable disk to another instead of rebuilding, but with XP and this utility
partition (possibly the 2 of them combined) has created a big problem for
me.

I hope someone can specifically confirm they were able to do duplicate a
Dell drive with the DellUtility partition and XP Home edition. If so what
specific tools or process did they have to use. I just can't get myself to
spend another $50 - $70 on a solution, unless I know it will work.

Any more guidance to there ?