Hard drive/ operating system cloning

[road_rascal]

So I decided to ditch my old Wiin98 desktop and bought a fairly nice Gateway WinXP system from the local pawn shop (pretty good deal for $150- 3Gb P4, 512Ram, Radeon 9200 graphics card, 40Gb drive, CD/RW drive and a 17" monitor). I take it to work, blow out 2.5 years of dust, throw in the nearly new WD 80Gb hard drive out of my old desktop as a slave drive, and delete most of the garbage off of the primary drive. Now, while the pawn shop computer came with the OEM drivers disk, it did not come with the WinXP operating system disk, which is what I'll need if I ever have to reformat the system. So, what is the best/ easiest way to clone the primary drive info onto the slave drive (preferably into a separate folder or area so I can still use some of the drive for storage)? Looks like there's about 9.2Gb of info on the primary drive. Thanks.

[Chewy]

right click on my computer/manage and go to disk management

is there a hidden partition? the OS installer would be there

call gateway and order the disk?

as long as you have the certificate number for xp on the side of the case
you have several options

http://support.wdc.com/download/

the data lifeguard tools include a cloneing function

[road_rascal]

I'll call Gateway and see what they say. I have the Data Lifeguard disk/ tools but it looks like it's just for file transfers. I really don't see a feature for cloning. I'll dig deeper. Thanks.

[GWhite]

Try the freeware version of XXclone from xxclone.com.
This version DOES NOT do daily incremental backups but WILL clone an XP system hard drive to another drive or partition.
The drop down menu then lets you make the TARGET drive bootable.
When done, shut down your pc, remove the SOURCE drive from the cable and install the newly cloned drive in its place.
Read any help or install information from the download website before you attempt the cloning operation just to be clear with the procedure.

G

[road_rascal]

Thanks for the link. All I really need is to clone the OEM WinXP drive to the additional HDD I installed just in case the comp crashes. I called Gateway and asked about a recovery disk and I gave them the serial # of the comp, and the lady said it's a Win98 system. I said no way, I punched in the serial # on the Gateway website and shows a build date of 4-2004 with WinXP, and she says, no, it's a Win98 system and wanted to argue with me. I'll call back later and see if I get someone else. The recovery discs are only $20.