The Glade 4.0

Yes, silly me, I've never actually bothered doing this before until now. The problem I'm having is every utility I've read about or tried doesn't seem to do precisely what I want.

My system has two identical internal HDs, normal SATA, not RAID. The idea was to only ever use one, with everything installed on it including the OS, but to make the other drive a duplicate that I could quickly and easily make my primary bootable drive if the first one ever died on me. Yes I probably should've just had it configured as a RAID when I got the system but I didn't know much about RAID at the time and it's too late now anyway. So, the problem I have is every backup utility seems to only create a 'system image file' on the other drive, which doesn't actually make it a bootable copy of the drive. Is there any easy way to do this?

Backup a system image to an external drive, use your raid to mirror the 2 SATA drives, then restore.

OR, boot from a Linux distro into RAM and learn to use dd

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In time, this too shall pass.

I have neither an external HD nor are my two internal HDs in RAID. All I'm trying to determine is if it's possible to use some program to create an exact bootable clone of one drive from another, so that if my original drive died, I could simply make a change in the BIOS to boot from the other drive. And I'm not sure what you meant by your second option Taskiss.

You can use a "live CD" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_CD

Then, use the UNIX app "dd" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29

That's what I would do, but I already have those and know how to use them.

It looks like this may help if that's not your thing -
http://clonezilla.org/
I never heard of it, but it looks like it'll work

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In time, this too shall pass.

symantec Ghost works fine for this

Yeah, you're going to be looking for an actual cloning or imaging tool, not a backup tool. As Riov noted, Ghost is probably the most prevalent.

Depending on your RAID controller, you *may* even be able to create a RAID 1 without wiping the disk you want the data from, and let it just "rebuild" the RAID as if the second disk had failed and been replaced.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

That was also what I was going to suggest. Just build a new mirroring raid, and set the 2nd (backup) disk as the mirror.

Backup the original drive first. I've seen mirror sets sync off the wrong disk more than once and you don't get a second chance.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Yes. Please back up your data first. As Taskiss said, this would suck so much if it went the wrong way. (that's what she said)

Thanks everyone. Well since I'm not familiar at all at dealing with RAIDs, I might just use Clonezilla or Norton Ghost.