Making an Installed Windows Sytem to a bootable external Hard Drive

[involutaryhaxor]

Here's the scoop.

I am helping someone who is having extreme troubles with burning CDs. They have gotten their burner replaced as it is under warranty. They still can't burn.

She needs to have all of her data backed-up because she is a professional photographer and can't afford to lose all of her pictures. She is very good about making back-ups, but some of them she can't back-up now because she can't burn.

I tried a linux live cd to test her burner, but unfortunately all that I had was the Knoppiz DVD and she didn't have enough memory to copy the entire CD to ram so I wasn't able to get the CD out and do a test burn.

We bought a 250gig external hardrive for $150 at COMPUSA (which has another additional $50 rebate) and we are going to back-up all of her data onto this external hard drive and then format her system and re-install windows because we believe that the problem is software related because she can't burn even after the drive has been replaced (she can read though).

What I want to know is if there's a free utility that will allow me to copy her current windows system to the USB drive so that I can boot off of that and it will be her exact system.

Any suggestions? Not only for making the bootable drive but also for fixing her burner. I tried a linux live cd to test her burner, but unfortunately all that I had was the Knoppiz DVD and she didn't have enough memory to copy the entire CD to ram so I wasn't able to get the CD out and do a test burn.

[Leith]

hey man,
             What you're going to want to do is boot up to knoppix, after booting to knoppix, assuming her internal drive is IDE and external is USB, type dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda now this will onliy work if the internal drive is IDE and first master and the external is the only USB/SCSI/SATA plugged into the machine



this should work, but i do not guarantee the safety of your data