Thank you. I would rather be able to go to cd or even a SD card. As far as I
backing up, I have always just dragged and dropped all my documents and
programs to an external 200gig usb 2 drive. XP sure makes that quick and
easy. My problem is all these activations I am getting now. I would like to
stop that and I was thinking imaging my programs, and especially XP, would
be a work around.

The programs I own now are Nero's BackItUp and a little program I got from
Download.com called R-drive image.


"Andy/Bandi" <kanadaiy@telus.net> wrote in message
news:5d%uf.30268$AP5.7125@edtnps84...
>
> "Xu" <xuxuxuxu@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:dGHuf.38686$Lb1.8053@bignews3.bellsouth.net.. .
>>I am trying to learn how to image my drive. I have dabbled with it and I
>>see that the actual image would be 32gig in size. I am wondering what I
>>can do to make this process smaller? I wonder if I reformatted and put XP
>>on a separate partition if that would help because right now two copy
>>programs I have tried both want to copy the hole HDD. I assume that is
>>because I have everything on one partition.
>>
>> I have no floppy, so trying to use the disks for boot up is not much of
>> an option for me unless I can use one of my sd disks in the card reader.
>>
>> What I want is a full copy of my system, and all the files that install
>> in the Programs folder. That is all I want. I don't care about anything
>> else, so it does not seem necessary that I copy the whole drive, which is
>> actually a 75gig drive.
>
> Try Norton Ghost. It will copy all the data in a partition, nothing more.
> Therefore the destination partition will only need to be large enough to
> accommodate your 32 gigs of data, plus provision for needed expansion.
>
> Most emergency restore programs I'm familiar with require a floppy drive.
> I certainly wouldn't be without one.
>
> I keep my Windows XP system, programs, mail and data in separate
> partitions. It sure simplifies restoring partitions without losing data.
>
> Andy
>