Now get a hard drive at least the same size as your present drive, preferably a larger one though, and hook it up. If the hard drive is an IDE style drive, I recommend that you adjust the pin or pins on the back to cable select mode. If it's the new SATA type drive, you do not need to worry about making any kinds of adjustments, just install it. Run the software and very very carefully follow the instructions. If you are the least bit uncomfortable in doing this, DO NOT DO IT. You can make a wrong move and lose everything. You should be able to hire a good reputable local computer person to do this for you for $100.00 or less, without the cost of the new hard drive or software needed. Adding in these costs puts the total to at least $250.00 on average per cloned drive.
Now here is the best part of the advice I can give you. Make sure before you clone your drive that you have your present computer set up exactly how you want it. You are not going to leave the newly cloned drive n the computer case. The reason for that is if your hard drive gets corrupted, your clone drive may very well get corrupted as well making the entire purpose of having a cloned hard drive nil. So remove the cloned drive once completed and put it aside making sure you mark it as to what it is and what it goes to. Keep back ups of your files after you make the cloned drive so that you can easily add them back in when the time comes, and it will come. But let's look at the real benefit of now having that cloned drive on the side. When, not if, your hard drive becomes corrupted or crashes, just remove it and install the clone. All the programs are there minus a few updates and new files. Your back up and working in less than 20 minutes as compared to hours upon hours over many days and lots of frustrations of trying to re install everything.
Just repeat what you did the first time either with the crashed hard drive or with a new one. Little or nothing lost. One last note on this. If you should install a one Key per computer, expensive piece of software after making that clone, you can re clone the clone you have in stock, or you can re install it without the headaches of worrying about a Key match as the Keys will match, but you might lose your files if you failed to back them up periodically.
