My desktop has two hard drives. One is running Vista 64 and one is running XP. My XP hard drive I'd like to use to store things on (as a backup) in addition to running XP. My XP HD is not as large as I'd like it to be though. I'd like to buy a new HD to replace it with. I'd like to use Ghost to make a copy of the HD image and then store it somewhere so I can just put that image on the new HD. My friend gave me a ghost cd and I tried to boot to it but it gave me an error that there wasn't a valid fat or fat32 partition. I'm not really sure, I've never used Ghost before.

Instead of doing that I suggest you buy a third drive and use it for backups and partition images. If you image to a folder it doesn't use the entire partition. If you have Vista you probably have SATA hard drives. If you don't already own a version of Ghost that will work with SATA drives I suggest you consider Acronis true image instead. There are several versions. I suggest you compare them and decide. Look into disk director too. newegg.com is also the best place online to buy hardware too. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...

I suspect the Ghost version you have is an old version, probably unable to read NTFS if that is the file system you are using for XP. Vista uses NTFS file system. You would be better off buying Acronis True Image which is compatible with both systems. It can be used whithin Windows to make an image of a drive or partition.

I read that the new version of acronis true image can be run while the system is in windows without needing to be boot to. Is that true? Can you also make a bootdisk from it that lets you do that?

My reason for doing it is, I already have a 500GB external but I take it to school with me and it moves around a lot and I'm afraid that it will die one day and I'll lose everything on it. It'll be cheaper to just buy an internal drive than an external but I can't fit all of these HD's in my PC so I figure I'll just have it be my XP+backup drive.

Newer versions of Ghost can also be run from Windows too. Both start the backup image process from within Windows but then restart the computer to make the actual image. You can send an image to most any media that your computer can access. IMO the best method is to image your boot partition to DVDR. That disk/s will be bootable and that is how you can restore. There are other methods too. Some will require a boot disk, which can be created using the imaging programs. Where the newest versions of Acronis excel is that it can perform incremental backup. That means it only writes the changes to the partition since the last full backup. This saves time and space. As part of a good backup plan you need to think about using multiple partitions instead of one large one. Many things on the computer don't change much, so backups are not needed as frequently. Other things change daily. Look at the link below to learn more about partitioning strategies. http://partition.radified.com/

Yes. My thought was that my XP HD is not very important. All I use it for is to run a few programs that I could reinstall anyway. If I were to buy a new larger HD I would create a partition for my XP install and then leave the rest of the HD as a partition for storage. If my XP install goes corrupt, at least I'll still have my good partition. And if the whole HD goes belly up, I have my original 500GB external for the important things.