I am assembling a backup system for the first time. It is an external 80GB IDE hard drive, USB. My box only has about 1.2 GB of stuff on it, and I would like to be able to clone the whole thing, system and all, to the external HD, and then do a backup twice a week or so - preferably with a couple of clicks, if that's possible. Can anyone here suggest which software is best for this? I'll be running a Compaq DeskPro P3/1000/20/256, with the choice of W2000 and W98SE available. Thanks for any suggestions

I used Nortons Ghost and that worked very easily except some of the drive letters got mixed up after I cloned the image back to a formatted hard drive. The 'virtual drive' swapped letters and icons with a regular drive. Norton was part of Norton System Works 2004 which I had to register again to get it to work and also my version of ZoneAlarm firewall also stopped working. I have since found out there were unrelated problems with the first image (probably from an update disc stalling when I first put Windows in). I say unrelated, but I don't know for sure. Next time I try the cloning, I will put a copy of ZoneAlarm and my virtual drive software on the desktop and then can install it after cloning back the image. With Ghost, you can clone the image direct to a DVD-R or 1 or more CD-R disc's (it will tell you how many will be required before you start the burn) or to another hard drive and then afterwards you make a Nortons Start-up Disk on a floppy. You may require your Win 98 OS disc for this as some DOS files are required on the floppy and Norton puts the rest on it. To install the clone you just start the PC with the start up disk in the floppy drive and follow the instructions. Norton compresses the files onto the CD-R's to around 75% of the original C: drive size. To copy the image back takes around 15 minutes but to install Windows and the other software the regular way takes several hours!! You can probably get a Norton System Works pro 2002 disc from Ebay for around £5 ($8). My 2004 version states that the version of ghost on it is 2003....... A friend has used Drive Image 2002 version 6 an said that works OK for him. I have not tried it.