Cloning a drive with XP on

[efilflah]

Hello there,

Recently my pc crashed and xp was corrupted, luckily i managed to repair and restore my pc to a recently saved restore point but the cause was the fact that my main hard drive is dying.

If it has a vital crash again I'll lose all my configuration settings and Ill have to reformat and install almost everything again. This will take a long time but there is an easier way so I've read.

As a replacement for my Western digital IDE 40gb I bought a a Maxtor 120gb SATA drive. Using PARTITION MAGIC 8 I formatted and partitioned the drive as one big partition.

Because my WD is my C: with XP on, how do i go about making an exact replica of this drive on my SATA so that I can just get rid of the WD and leave the SATA running things like the WD left it?

Thanks in advance and please be clear in your replies, I am a total dumbass and I'm really in a panic here.

again ...god bless u

**EDIT**

After attempting the copy of the C: partition to my SATA Drive, it needed to boot to complete the copying.

I got this error:

Batch(1611) Bad system filename, file 9(48)

This apparantly occurs sometimes if CHKDSK hasn't been run and the drive has bad sectors?

This is the only obstacle to overcome. Once I have the partition copied I can remove the WD and boot fromthe SATA....grrrrr

Please help I've got a uni final year project to do and im running out of time

[strekship]

I know its possable to clone drives. I know someone who used norton ghost on his laptop hdd so he could put his stuff on a new 30gb hdd.

[Exodia]

A simple file copy will not work, try using norton ghost.

If you dont want to buy ghost, try using the ms dos way, have a look here...

http://www.windows-help.net/features/copy-hd-pf.html