Norton Ghost and XP

[Telemachus]

After one too many dodgy crashes I decided to finally get around to backing up my laptop and after looking at Norton Ghost it seemed perfect for me, I could weekly make a bootable copy of my entire harddrive and put it on an external harddrive or onto a drive on my desktop, that way if my laptop dies I could simply stick the bootable drive immediatly in another pc and run as if nothing had happened which would be extremely useful as I use the laptop on a daily basis for work.

However i've been thinking since the laptop runs XP wouldnt I have major problems trying to do something like this because Xp refuses to boot up when it's moved to a new computer? It'd be really great if anyone could give me an idea of how I could make a bootable copy like this of XP. Cheers.

[asklepios]

norotn ghost helps you to make a bootable image for the same computer not for a different PC.
if you install an image that was installed on one PC to another one, it will have all sort of drivers related problems.
almost all the ghosting programs available out there are used to back up for the same PC and not for a new one with different hardware.

[Telemachus]

Thanks for clearing that up, I guess your right about driver problems especially given the difference between the laptops software and my desktops hardware. My main fear is of the laptop hard drive dieing in the future (it has happened to me already once and replacing the drive was nigh on impossible), do you know if its possibble to make an image of the hard drive on a firewire connected external drive and boot from that?

[Chezman29]

You should be able to. You would just have to change the boot process to the firewire connection if it allows that. I know mine allows booting from USB, although I have never checked for firewire since I don't use it.

Regards,
Chez