markie_mac

Hi all, firstly - apologies if this has been raised before - I'm a new member here; I have a laptop running XP with large USB external hard disk. If my main C: drive goes down, to avoid loosing lots of work time, I want to have a copy of my system on my external disk, so I can continue working and fix the problem in parallel to that. Now, initially I tried using the XP backup utility, backing up my entire system and restoring on the external hard disk. Restarting the system having selected this disk to boot from - the system just hangs. OK, so perhaps the system backup copy isn't really a complete copy of the system... I figured I need maybe to start with XP installed on the external disk. So, I began to install XP on this disk. But it seems XP wants to install itself on my C drive by default... Having just reinstalled XP on my C drive a week previously, and had to reinstall all my apps and reconfigure etc., I didn't want to risk this new install screwing up my now-perfect C: drive, so I abandoned the attempted install of XP on the external disk. So - how do I do this job and get a nice bootable copy of my main C: drive on an external disk??? Thanks mark