I should also add that is you have a old computer that you are no longer using or its broken and not worth repairing you can also pull the old hard drive and buy a case for it and turn it into a external. There are many different sites you can get cases from HERE is some examples of cases. Its just a cheap way to recycle your used parts and put them to good use.

I gotta ? With windows vista, you can restore back your computer to the original setup, but suppose my hd goes out, no more system restore..... So I guess I'm wondering how to back up the os to place on my new future hd? I've never seen a definitive explanation on the net.
Ive made the initial backup disks, but I don't think that backs up the os
does it?

Waring this is a bit higher level tech stuff.

What I like to do is use imageing software like Chronos or ghost and make an image of my C drive after I get my computer setup just how I like it. That is my base image. Then store the image offline on either a different computer or external hard drive. You can periodically creat an image of your pc if your hard drive changes from time to time. That way if your hard drive fails you can get a new drive and through your old image on it and bamm! Your computer is back.

I also when building any pc lke to partion my drive or drives. What I mean by partion if your are not familar with the term is basically splitting the drive up into smaller pices. So you let's say you have a 200 gig dirve. I would probably make a 60 gig partion for my operating system (or C: drive). The remaining space can be left as one drive or partioned further. I never save any important data to my C: drive then. The C: drive is only used for installing programs that I know I have on disk that can be re installed later. This way if your computer get's infected with a nasty virus or the operating system become corrupt your data that is on one of the other partions is sitting safe and sound. then you can reimage your C: drive with the image you created when you first built your hard drive.

This however does not protect you from situations when the drive actually fails. Meaning it dies and will no longer boot at all. to protect your data in this type of situation then either using mutiple drives inside the system or utilizing external drives for at least backing up your data is the best situation.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."

More then once has someone come to me telling me that there computer has crashed and will not boot up. Then they ask me if there is a way to get all there data back. So I ask them 2 questions and more times then not they look at me with a blank look on there face at a loss as to how these 2 questions. What questions did I ask them? The meaning of life? How to better understand women? Nope. I simply asked. what kind of data did you have? and Where was the data located? Those 2 questions can be the 2 hardest things to answere for the every day computer user. So I guess where i'm going with this before this turns into a unreadable wall of text that makes your eyes bleed are a few extremely important thing for everyone to understand about there "data".

You should understand what you have on your computer and where it is located. If you create word documents you should know where you save them on your computer! If you have photos, music, graphics, or simply anything that you downloaded, saved, tranfered, or created on your computer you should know where it is! And just as importantly what it is.

I'm not saying you should know from memory every file name or anything like that. Just when you save a file in word. Have a location selected that makes sense to you. Preferably off of your C: drive.

Most office programs will default to save to your mydocuments directory and most of the time most of a users data will be located in the mydocuments directory. I personally like to create my own driectories to save my data to. For instance I have a directory created called "Downloads". When I download something from the internet I save it to the "downloads" directory. This way if there comes a time when your hard drive will not boot. And you want to try and retrive data off of the drive. You know where your important data is, and also what it is. Those programs on your C: drive hopefully you still have the CDrom or dvdrom or the downloaded .exe so you can reinstall that sort of thing.

In closeing knowing what and where your data is and organizing it in a logical way for you to understand not only helps in the retieval of lost data but will also help you in backing up your data and knowing that you are backing up what's important.

And remember. Knowing is half the battle.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hope that after I die, people will say of me: "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."

Good info, thanks both of you! I've read alittle bout partitioning, but it seemed like an unnecessary step for my use.
I will look into it further next time I restore.

btw sm, I have c: drive, and d: which is the recovery. I guess in that respect its already partitioned, so are you saying to try and back up the recovery partition?