Cloning a windows partition to a usb hard drive

[joey1211]

I have a sff system so have a partioned hd (c: and d: ). I use an external usb drive for backup of my d partition which contains the My Documents folder. I use xxcopy /clone for this.

Am I right in thinking that this will not work for cloning my windows partition. What is the best free method of doing this. I have tried using Ultimate Boot CD but the tools on that either dont see the usb drive or are too complex to use.

Any ideas?

 

[Jonny69]

I don't think you can use xcopy on the system partition, but you could use a 3rd party cloning software like Ghost or Acronis TrueImage

 

[joey1211]

I used to use the old Norton Ghost on my win98 pc, but i wanted to avoid spending any money. And i'm using xxcopy, not xcopy (the native dos program)