I just backed up my system last night, it was incredibly easy… I only needed the diskette that was included with one of the hard drives when I bought it. I’ll explain what I did – forgive me since most everyone on this board knows a lot more about computers than I do, but I just can’t see why everyone is confused about a simple duplication process.

My main drive is a Western Digital 120SE, and I wanted to back it’s contents (about 40 Gig worth of Win XP, some apps, and games) onto an older 60Gig Samsung that I have. I yanked one of the CD drives, and stuck the Samsung in it’s place, then booted from WD’s floppy. It’s a very straightforward process – “drive to drive copy”, then just choose your “from” and “to” drives. It ran for about 4 hours and was complete. You can choose what partition size you want as well – I just let it fill up the drive.

I stuck the Samsung (the backup) in place on IDE 1 to check it out (and put the CD drive back where it was) and restarted the machine. Booted fine, ran the “check for consistency”, and wanted a restart (because it found a new drive brand and it was a different size). After the restart, it worked perfectly. I checked e-mail (dumb move since now I have mail on the backup but not my primary), played a bit of Unreal, and checked out a few other programs as well. Ins hort, it made a perfect duplicate. No fuss, no extra money to buy Norton, nothing at all. Couldn’t have been easier.

Norton and similar programs obviously have their strong points, but if you’re just copying from one IDE to another, and don’t mind swapping a few cables for a short period, it really can’t get easier than the diskette that comes with whatever drive you own…