Copy / Xp

Hi there

i want to format my hard drive that has windows XP SP1 on it. My other hard drive is to small to copy my things over. How do I use a cloning program that will clone eveything on my hard drive so I can reformat then put eveything back as normal. Can you give me a program and detail it out how I do this.

Thanks for your time.
:confused:

I think you're looking for Norton Ghost...it makes an exact duplicate to copy onto a partition or another motherboard.
There may be free versions out there that'll do the same but I'm not the one to advise you on which are OK to use.

Yeah i would use norton ghost. suck an image onto your other computer then using a ghost boot disk. boot up and drop the image onto your formatted hard drive.

You dont need 2 computers you can just put the image on another partition then burn it to cd or use it from the other partition .. :)

ahhh..hey guys..

if you clone the hdd.. format the drive.. then restore the image to the drive.. aren't you back where you started?

I mean if you have a sick windows installation, image it .. clean the drive and restore back to the drive.. you still have a sick windows installation.

if your backing up data.. use a compression prog like WinRAR, even Norton Ghost. compress your Data and settings to this smaller drive as well as to CD's (have had hdd's die between write and read..and CD's die after verification)... then...
delete partition.. create new partitions..(there are many recomendations..minimum is 1 for OS and a 2nd for Data..some will recommend at least one more for the paging/swap file)
format
clean install
install your regular progs, make your needed security adjustments and misc setting s ..some of these are in your backups.
Now Image your HDD..
and now restore your data from the earlier backups.. ..
..

next time you need to fix the install..restore from the image.. your data is on the 2nd partition and backed up.. so it will not be such an effort

undertaker is right. Ghost is great from when you are setting up machines that will be identical (say classroom computer that all need the exact same stuff, and are VERY similar in hardware) but for this a standard backup will work very well.