Backing up Hard Drive

Is there a way to back up a hard drive onto an External USB drive, where the backup mirrors the original hard drive? Not just data files, but also software, programs, etc? So if the Hard drive crashes, you can use the external as the original? If yes, can you explain how to do it?
Thanks a lot,
Lou

[gusser]

loubal1005,

I think a good option for you would be looking into ghost or another imaging solution. Ghost can make an image of your HD (everything, not just data files) that can be restored to your origirinal hard drive if something happens. I'm not sure if it uses compression or not so you may need a lot of space.

gus

Read this, it's not that complicated: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx

Everything you need to back up your computer comes on your XP disk.

[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
loubal1005,

I think a good option for you would be looking into ghost or another imaging solution. Ghost can make an image of your HD (everything, not just data files) that can be restored to your origirinal hard drive if something happens. I'm not sure if it uses compression or not so you may need a lot of space.

gus

[/ QUOTE ]

I second using Ghost. Make sure you use Ghost 2003 (comes added on with recent upgrade to ver 10) since Ghost 2003 is the last Ghost that can be exclusively performed from DOS, something you want after a HD crash.

My Norton Ghost Images are compressed to about 65% of the original C: partition.

Radified (http://ghost.radified.com/) has a great guide to Norton Ghost.

~ Rick