Copying the contents of an entire hard drive

[jp_bl_68]

It's been a while since I've used Windows so I'm not entirely sure how to go about doing this. My mother has an old Acer laptop running XP SP2. It's incredibly slow so I've recommended that she reinstall XP. She uses it for work and has a lot of important information stored on her hard drive (about 15GB on C: and about 20GB on D: ) that she wants to keep but she isn't sure where it all is. Neither of us have time to sit down and search the entire computer. What's the best way for me to backup this information? Can I just drag and drop the C: and D: to an external HDD?

I don't want to make my external HDD into a bootable drive, I just want to be able to store the information so it will be easily accessible should she need to retrieve any old files.

 

[theheyes]

For the D drive you will want to copy over all of the files by the sounds of it.

For the C drive, all of her files and folders should be under her named user folder inside "Documents and Settings". For peace of mind you might want to copy the entire Documents and Settings folder. This will contain the Desktop, My Documents Folder etc etc of everyone who has logged into the machine.

If you're doing mass file copies, you might want to consider using RichCopy which is a bit more robust when handing large amounts of files.

 

[AbsenceJam]

No, as there will be all sorts of in-use files you can't copy so it'll get interrupted. You could grab something like Acronis and clone the drive to the external or use some sort of livecd to copy everything.

 

[jp_bl_68]

Thanks. I'll try RichCopy.