[RTTY] Off Subject Help Needed - Ghosting a hard drive?

[Don Hill AA5AU]

My main shack computer is a Dell Dimension 4600 running XP Pro that is probably going on 8-10 years old?  I don't know how long I've
had it.  I'd like to replace the hard drive before it dies.  I have no reason to think it will die soon, it works great, but logic
tells me I should probably do something about it before it does.  I've lost hard drives in other computers in the past and as we all
know, it's not a nice thing to have happen.

When we lost the hard drive in my wife's computer (we back most of everything up on a portable drive), I bought a Western Digital
320 GB PATA drive and installed it in her PC, reinstalled XP and loaded everything back on.  It was kid of a pain but it all worked.
So I bought the same drive for my PC (both require a parallel drive).  I do have a secondary drive cable in my PC.

What I'd prefer to do is to "ghost" the new drive from my existing drive if that is what I need to do.  I'd just like to replace my
existing drive with the new drive so it's bootable and has all the programs already installed on it without having to reinstall
everything.  What I read on the Internet is a bit confusing and contradicting and I would prefer to hear advice from knowledgeable
computer gurus here on the reflector that I trust.  I think I have Ghost by Symantec on a disk somewhere as I used to use Norton
Internet Security or perhaps there are programs out there that are better suited for this.  I just don't know.

Please reply directly.  Thanks!  And sorry for the rtty-unrelated bandwidth.

73, Don AA5AU
http://www.aa5au.com
http://www.rttycontesting.com