Hello I was looking into various disk imaging/cloning programs. What I'd like to do is make an exact copy of my hard drive and put it onto another hard drive that way I won't have to reinstall everything. What's the BEST program to do this? Also, how is it in term's of performance? Won't the new hard drive need different drivers etc. then whatever the old hd had?

Try SelfImage which is free. I've never used it to clone a hard drive, but I've used it to write a partition to a file, and then write it back to the partition later. It takes about 20 minutes to write a 7.5GB partition to a file on this 1.6GHz system I'm using. "Won't the new hard drive need different drivers etc. then whatever the old hd had?" I don't think you will run into any problems with this unless you're cloning from an IDE to a SATA drive or vice versa. I've never attempted cloning a hard drive, so I can't say for sure. SelfImage is here: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System... WinSimple Software

Better to use an imaging program and not bother with the second drive at all. I suggest you image directly to DVDR. Acronis or Ghost are two programs that will do that. Acronis is about $30 at newegg.com. If there is a need to restore your image you simply boot to the First DVDR of the set. Both programs are capable of spanning multiple disks or imaging to most any place you have available. External drive, network, second internal HD, etc.

I agree with othehill that it's better to do an image than cloning. Creating an image on DVDs is probably the safest, but creating an image on a separate hard drive is also an option, and is faster.

Whats the difference between creating an image on a DVDR and creating a clone on a hard drive? I'm not sure I understand. Also, how many DVDRs will I need? Is any compression done?

Yes compression is done. Cloning a harddrive, depending on which program used, can make an exact copy of the drive or of the contents of the drive. Using the contents allows you to migrate to a larger drive. There are two primary reasons to create a clone or image. First is if your OS gets trashed somehow. The second is in case of drive failure you can replace the drive with a new unit. While using a cloned hard drive theoretically works there are some issues with that method. First of all you won't keep up with the constant changes to the system drive. If you do attempt to keep up you will spend a lot of time connecting and rewriting the entire cloning process. Imaging, whether to a hard drive or optical media can be faster and more up to date because modern utilities allow for incremental backup, which will only write the changes since the last time you ran the program. My ideal method is to create 3 partitions on the main hard drive. C partition is for the OS. Second is for the programs. Third is for personal data. When you first setup the system and all is updated you create an image of the C partition, the D partition and if any data exists the E partition. As each one of these needs updating you update individually. The typical WinXP install is going to be small enough to fit on one DVDR. I buy DVDR for 10/15 cents each on sale. This makes burning an image fast and cheap. Should you need to restore from that image the DVDR is bootable and will restore right from there. I use Ghost 2003 and I can burn to a combination of any CD/DVD media and can create images to another internal or external drive including across a network. IMO that makes imaging much better.