clone image of drive? going out to store today, could use some quick advice

hello,

i'm going out today to buy a 500gb hard drive for a sample library to use with Sonar.

i'll have tons of left over space, since the sample library is under 20gig.

i heard of something that when you install the drive, you might be able to clone your main hard drive.

i would like to clone all of my applications, so if my main drive dies, i can use the 500gb drive until
i replace the main drive.

i have original operating system disks.  but if it's a good idea to also clone the operating system,
i can do that too.

i'm not sure how all of that would work, because all of my software is keyed to purchased licenses.

so if anybody has some recommendations, that would be great.

this is for windows xp.  i'm not sure what the steps are. but i know when you install a hard drive
for the first time, there is a "moment of truth" where you can make some fundamental decisions.

so i'm wondering what i should do once my computer sees the new drive for the first time.

my computer use is light compared to some of the power 48-track users around here.  i'm more
defense oriented than offense with computers.  so things like "it will allow you to reboot if your main
system crashes" is far more interesting to me than "you'll get 10 more track counts and you can run 2
more reverbs".

thanks for any ideas!

The basic idea of "cloning" is to make a sector by sector copy of an existing drive or partition onto an empty drive or partition. The new drive/partition  then looks like the old drive to the computer. The main use of that process is to copy the operating system along with the installed software so that you can replace the old drive with the new one and not have to re-install everything. Licensing (and copy protection) aside, you should have no problem doing that. If the copy protection checks to see if there are changes to the physical drive, you may need to re-authorize the protected applications.

But if you are only looking for a backup of the old drive, then you do not need to clone. You can instead create an image of the drive. An image is a large file written by something like Acronis Trueimage or Ghost or (for XP at least the free PING http://ping.windowsdream.com/). You can write that file to some free space on your new drive, and if the (old) boot drive becomes corrupted, you can restore it to the state it was last saved.

If your old drive is working fine, I think you would be better to keep it and use the new drive to store audio files and a disk image of the boot drive, rather than replace the old drive and put your OS programs and data on the same single drive.