Is it possible to duplicate my whole hdd...

[Chuckyfaz]

Is it possible to duplicate my whole hdd drive and install the second hdd in a different pc and everything work as the original?

So if my hdd did do one on me, i could simply unplug it throw it at someone and install the back up hdd in its place?

I've never heard of being able to do this and suspect it wont be that simple, if it isnt possible what is the best way to back up everything?

I do hold all my software install files on an external drive incase i needed to start again but still that is a long job.

Am i as prepared as i can be?

Cheers

Chucky

[shyster]

Well it is possible to duplicate an entire hard drive, but whether it would work in another computer or not is a different question altogether.

Dell for example will build all of their computers in a series, load the OS and all the other annoying crap that they load on and then "clone" that one computer onto all the others.

That essentially is what you want to do with your hard drive it sounds like.

I am not sure how exactly to go about cloning a hard drive, but I am sure a google search would turn up numerous things.

The other possible method to do it would be to run a Raid 1 configuration which is the mirror configuration of raid (I believe, I always get 0 and 1 mixed up). That would require have two of the exact same hard drive and then just running them in a raid setup.

As for the second question of transfering it to another computer. More than likely if the computer has different hardware than the original the OS will not initialize and you will be screwed there. Secondly most or all of your drivers will not work and that could also screw you up considerably.

That is all I can think of for now, someone should come along with more info or details on better answers.

[The Wise Monkey]

Symantec used to have something called Ghost, which did just that - took an image of a HD, stored it somewhere, then extracted it back onto another HD. Really useful tool. :)

They still do it:

http://www.symantec.com/norton/products/overview.jsp?pcid=br&pvid=ghost14