Backup entire hard drive?

[thejeremy]

My current hard drive is an internal 120 GB hard drive. It has 2 partitions, one housing Windows XP Pro and the other housing Fedora Core 5. If I bought another hard drive, say 300 GB or so, how would I go about backing up my current hard drive so that I could boot off of the backed up one in the future? Basically I want to copy everything on the current hard drive - not just files, but the boot record, everything, so it's bootable. If the new hard drive is bigger, will this cause a problem? Will I have to make partitions first?

Thanks in advance.

 

[talldude123]

You could use Norton Ghost and copy everything onto the other hard drive. I've seen it done before at Best Buy.

I don't know if you can keep your XP license though; you'd have to talk to MS about that.

 

[thejeremy]

I'll look into that.

I wouldn't expect to have a problem with the license. I mean I wouldn't ever be using both drives at once. I'd only be using the backup drive if my current one took a total crap on me. I just wanna have it backed up in case that does happen. I've had my current one for 2 years now, so I'm sure it has lots of life left. It's a Seagate and I think they're warranteed for ~5 years.

 

[Trotter]

Ghost is the ticket, for sure.

As long as the backup is used in the original computer there is no problems about licensing.

 

[thejeremy]

So in terms of the Windows license, how does it check that? Does it somehow save data that is hardcoded into your hardware, like a serial number in the motherboard or something?

I'd probably use the same computer, unless hardware started going bad in that one or if I just built a new one.