Hi guys and gals,

After spending MANY hours trying to find the answer to this question but to no avail I am desperately hopeful one of you can help.
Having had to completely re-install my operating system (and thus programs, settings etc) on a number of occasions over the last couple of years and having just had to do the same I am desperate to find a way of backing up my operating system (XP-Home) along with my installed programs and settings so that in the event of an OS failure I can simply restore from this backup.
So instead of me waffling on about all the things I've discovered and tried I'll tell you what I think is necessary. I have two internal Hard Drives - drive C: (80 GB and holds the OS and installed software etc, and drive D: (160 GB which holds my 'My Documents' folder). I also have an external USB Hard Drive (80 GB) which I use for backups. I do not have an OS installation disk just a 'Restore' disk and my I386 folder resides at C:/WINDOWS level and not at the root level (apparently this is relevant for using some software!).
The way I understand it is this. I firstly need to backup my C: drive and then be able to boot from another source (either a bootable CD or from my second or external HD) so as to be able to 'restore' the C: HD). I have considered perhaps even a different bootable OS (one of the Open Source ones) for this purpose. What would happen if I coppied the contents of my C: drive to my second or external HD's and selected to boot from them in the BIOS when necessary (is that possible?)
Anyway. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can give me.

Kind regards,
Navarre

Anyway. Thanks in advance for any assistance you can give me.

Everything you said can be made to work if you want to roll a backup solution yourself and spend a lot of time, but...

The best solution I've found for bare metal recovery is Acronis TrueImage (http://www.acronis.com) (no I don't work for them). The Linux based software creates an image of your entire drive(s) that can be stored on a USB drive, sent across a network connection to another computer, or burned to CD/DVDs. The software runs in Windows as well as off an OS-agnostic bootable CD it creates or a USB flash drive - very versatile.

I use this software (TrueImage Echo Workstation) daily for backing up client machines before working on them. You pop in the CD, hookup a network connection, and you're backing up in 2 minutes. As simple as it gets.

The software is fast too, and the image files it creates can even be mounted and explored at the file level in Windows if you need to restore just one file.

To restore when your hard drive dies, you stick any working drive in of sufficient capacity - whether's its blank or not doesn't matter, insert the CD again and restore to the new drive. Certain versions even allow restoration to different hardware.

I alos use True Image. Backup to my external drive and can use a bootable CD to restore the C partition. I do a file backup of my data drive with a weekly full backup and a daily incremental one.