Yes, you can do that.  I use Acronis, but there are other products that will also work.  When I used a Dimension 2400 I kept two 80 GB drives, one boot and one slave.  Periodically I would boot to the Acronis disk and clone the boot drive to the second drive.  I would then shut down, transfer the master connector to what had been the slave, and boot the computer with only the second drive connected.  This action ensured that the drive letter assigned to the drive was "C:".  It is important to remember that point because Windows keeps a record of the assigned drive letter on the drive.  I would then remove the slave and operate with only the original drive connected.  If something happened I simply disconnected the original drive and put the clone in its place.  If I wanted to troubleshoot the original drive I connected it as a slave to allow running diagnostics and re-imaging if it checked out ok.  I only ran one drive to save the back-up from wear and tear.  If you keep the slave in the system both drives degrade at about the same rate, and since I was using an older drive for the back-up I didn't want it to fail unexpectedly. The difference between a back-up and system image is that the back-up is essentially a fancy file copy.  Back-up programs do not necessarily copy parts of the disk that are essential to booting, for example.  An image of the drive is like taking a picture of the drive.  Every sector is addressed; a clone is an image that includes all the information needed for the drive to boot on the computer from which the image was taken.  When an image is restored it is necessary that the partition be at least as large as the partition from which the image was taken.  It is possible to cheat on that by a bit as I know that cloning applications often have an option to restore to a smaller partition provided that there is enough room for all the sectors that have information.  Empty sectors are discarded in such a case. You don't need to worry about making partitions unless you want to do that.  The cloning tools also allow you to expand the original partition into a larger one so that if you replace an 80 GB drive with a 320 GB drive you automatically get the advantage of a larger drive.
Hi, I have a Dimension 3000, xp pro, ie8. I would like to know if I can create a backup or system image (is there a difference?), to an internal slave drive? There are no partitions on it at this time. Would I need to create a partition? Would this allow me to switch the slave to master in case of the master failing and then boot up on the new master? Thanks in advance for any assistance, Liz.
Backup to an internal slave?