Disk/System wizard please

[FuzzyCritter]

1. Am adding on a new disk drive and wish to make it bootable
(since head crashes are kown to happen without any reason).
I do a BACKUP occasionally and the backup is already stored
on the system SECOND disk drive. The drive about to be installed
is a removeable 200 Gig Maxtor. No problems that I know of on
creating and installing. But, since I already do a backup all
I wish to have on the new drive is to have it bootable and a copy
of backup. Plain and simple. But, I assume that MS backup requires
the complete Windows operating system. It is not a stand alone program
or is it. If it is, all I need to do is make the drive bootable and
have a copy of backup on it. Don't think it's going to be that easy.

2. The system is an HP with XP multimedia. On the original drive is
the recovery partition. Big deal. If that drive completely zaps out
so much for a system recovery. And why are the files in that partition
FAT32? I also assume that these files are not touched when I do an
automatic update of the operating system. In fact, as far as I can see,
they are completely useless to me.

Since the system is now about 4 years old, just planning for the
unable to boot problem. Would like to have the new drive bootable
and a copy of backup so I can restore the whole drive. Is this asking
for too much? So, exactly what files do I need for an MS Backup restore?

TIA

 

[DL]

To make it bootable you would have to install an o/s on it, and I don't
believe you can boot win from an external drive.
Take a look at drive imaging software, eg Symantec Ghost or Acronis True
Image, and its usage.
MS Backup is not realy designed for what you want to achieve.

2) I thought, maybe I'm wrong, that the recovery partion allowed you to make
recovery disks