Backup

Tip for restoring your computer when it crashes (like hard drive, or OS problems).

You need the following:
1. An enclosure
2. A live CD

For Live CD, any Linux distribution should be fine. Personally I recommend Ubuntu/Elive.

So first in BIOS, set it to boot from CD, it should fire up the Live CD. Follow the instruction on the screen, you should be able to have a working console.

Do "sudo su" to become the root user.

Then figure out which device is your old hard drive (normally it would be /dev/sda as the enclosure is connected via the USB connection).

Finally, do "dd conv=noerror if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda"
- "if" for input, and "of" for output device.
- "conv=noerror" means ignore errors and just keep going.

The advantage of this approach is that it does bits by bits copying, so no need to re-install anything. Just make sure do a "scandisk" after the copying is completed.

Follow up: The only problem with that is Windows might complain that the hard drive is not the original version which it is installed on; but you can safely ignore that.