[computerwiz12890]

I want to make a backup of my entire hard drive. If I want to install a second hard drive and use that to backup to, what is the best program to use for that? I am looking for a program that will completly backup my main hard drive, one that will make the backup hard drive bootable. That way if my main one gets damaged, I can just pop in the backup drive and restore everything.

Preferably a good, free program

Thanks

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I dont think that there are any free ones, well none that can be found after a few hours at Google.

You have two options

Norton Ghost 9.0, which is good, but rather expensive and slow.
or...
Acrons True Image 8, which is better except it can be made to burn the image files to CD's or DVD's, you must limit the the size of the back up image files to 700mb or 4.7 GB and then burn them with some thing like Nero.

Both come with a bootable CD for restoreing the image files. Both back up every thing, operating system, programs, setting, personal files the lot.

I stuff my computer up on a reguler basis testing things, so I have restored my computer about 15 times by now

[Michael]

I dont think that there are any free ones, well none that can be found after a few hours at Google.

You have two options

Norton Ghost 9.0, which is good, but rather expensive and slow.
or...
Acrons True Image 8, which is better except it can be made to burn the image files to CD's or DVD's, you must limit the the size of the back up image files to 700mb or 4.7 GB and then burn them with some thing like Nero.

Both come with a bootable CD for restoreing the image files. Both back up every thing, operating system, programs, setting, personal files the lot.

I stuff my computer up on a reguler basis testing things, so I have restored my computer about 15 times by now

[computerwiz12890]

I see. You sound like me: I've already had to restore my computer 2 times due to experimenting with it. I have NTI Drive Backup, which I believe is just as good as the Norton Ghost, but I just wanted a second opinion. I made the mistake of putting my backups onto DVD-RWs and not only do they take forever to read/write to, but they are unreliable. Hopefully there won't be a next time for me, but if there is, I'll get to see how good NTI Drive Backup is.

Thanks