Best way to copy my Hard drive

Sounds like what you want is a disk image/clone. Windows 7 will do that for you:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Back-up-your-programs-system-settings-and-files
http://www.shivaranjan.com/2009/05/20/windows-7-how-to-create-a-system-image-of-a-hard-disk-partition-or-windows-7-partition/

There are several paid alternatives like Ghost, Acronis True Image, etc. And a few free alternatives that will do the job with more flexibility than Win 7. In general a restored image will have your authorization codes intact, unless the people who enforce the code have done something unusual like hiding something in spare cylinders or other sites not normally readable on the drive, keying it to a hardware hash or serial number etc. You will probably not find a problem if you are just restoring the image to the same drive.

Interesting. So, if/when I go Win7, I won't need something like Acronis True Image ??

I don't want to periodically back up data or put the data on anything other than a new hard drive,unless Win7 can recognize my data from a usb drive coming from stupid i.e a total hard drive blowout and without an OS DVD,which might be a job for the bios. I guess if Acronis is embedded at the kernal level it might recognize the saved image and reload it but I am not entirely sure.

I am still confused. If you just want to copy your data you can just use a plain copy. If you want to restore a functioning OS with installed programs in the event that your OS is corrupted or your drive fails, then a partition image is the solution. Win 7 will restore an image made from Win 7 by booting from your Win 7 installation DVD or a recovery CD that you create with Win 7. I have no idea what "embedded at the kernal level" means. Any of the imaging programs boot into some kind of OS, typically DOS or Linux, to do the restoration, and include utilities to create a bootable CD, floppy or USB flash drive that run from memory and will turn a machine with an empty hard drive into one with the system state that is identical to the way it was when the image is created. Obviously a corrupted installation of Windows can not be used to restore itself, but the restore operation just involves copying files (or in some cases sectors) and that can be done from a simple OS.  As far as I know Acronis will do that for any version of Windows (depending on the Acronis version).

As far as compression goes, well unless you want to have a drive as large as the one you are backing up, it can be handy. There are programs that will do uncompressed clones of one drive to another, but it is much less useful than you may imagine, being primarily used to turn out multiple machines with identical installations and sometimes for forensic work. The more elegant imaging programs do not save or restore stuff you do not need like your swap file unless you tell them to. I do not use compression for backing up my data, for the reason that you mention, i. e. I do not want to be dependent on a proprietary format to recover the irreplaceable. But you can always re-install your OS and programs, so an image is just a shortcut to recovering a working system, not a fail safe backup plan.

The convenience of using a partition image of the system is enhanced by partitioning your drive so that the system and programs are on a separate partition than your data. That way the image need be no larger than the files you actually need to restore in a system failure. Making an image of a huge unpartitioned drive that includes data mixed with programs takes up a lot of space and time.

 Thanks guys. I was not entirely sure how some of the image programs work and so some of my comments are probably a little confusing.
 I did partition both of my hard drives awhile back and went back and repartitioned one of them to give myself more room on that drive for a particular set of files. I never copied a partition like my Drive C though.

  I do remember some restrictions relating to partitions when dealing with my 'C' or boot drive. I was able to stretch and even delete partitions but was unable to do much with the main boot partition. If I can successfully periodically clone my drives with Win 7 thats great!

 One of the dilemmas that i can see is that I might want to only clone my C drive which is part of two partitions on HD 1.

 The cost and size of  my copying data isn't really a factor here. I can get multi TB drives for a great price ,so cloning or copying uncompressed data is not expensive in that regard. I want to make copies now and not wait until something catastrophic happens.

 When I bought my MOBO It had everything but RAID. I  can possibly get a RAID add on card  and have redundant drives on it which might make the most sense although if a freak electrical spike happens it could fry all of my drives. So occasionally making an outboard copy and keeping it off the system could also be a life saver.  What do you think about RAID as opposed to making a copy manually at set intervals?

well, if u hate automatic backup, u just do the backup by yourself at a certain interval.
i found an article about how to backup hard disk.

 Thanks guys for all of the suggestions and links you posted! I have never ran a RAID system but it sounds like just what I am after! The ability to make uncompressed exact copies of all my data and the choice to decide when to make a backup of the data on drives 2 & 3. In the event of a power outage or an HD platter failure or a needle jump things can keep right on going with no hassles if at least one of the drives is ok. To further protect the system Images can be burned periodically using win 7 onto an outboard drive.

   Tim, is there anything concerning RAID that maybe a newbe to it might need to know? or should know before doing it? One thing I can think of is noise factor- I might need to make the decision to put my DAW tower and drives in the basement under my studio....off the floor of course!

 I have a huge tower case somewhere....this thing is on its own wheels and I think it was intended to be a server. I could probably put all of the drives into it. I wonder if RAID 1 requires dedicated software to run it? I'm thinking out loud now.... I'll need to do a little more research on it.


 

 Like so many other things there are so many choices.Choices can be good and choices can be bad. I would rather have a few good choices than a dozen iffy ones. Most banks and large institutions that regularly house yours and my personal data have redundancy built in. Say, if a building burned down with a bank server in it there are usually at least one or two more servers with the same data on them somewhere else.

All of the programs that advertise that they make a backup image of your drive probably do a decent job. IME the last few hard drive failures I have had used imaging software which consolidates your data into a smaller foot print. On one of those failures I needed the  company software in order to reclaim my lost data. I had to do a lot of dancing in my bios to get my computer to boot to that proprietary software located on  DVD I had burned and'image' of. In short I needed to jump through a couple of hoops in order to save my data.

 Some data retireval scenareos require you to have the original OS dvd that came with your OS,only in one case I had lost that DVD so I was up the creek so to speak. IMO the easier it is to have a direct copy of something without changing bios/ trying to find lost DVDs etc. the less problems I will have when my computer decides to croak ;)

  Just trying to simplify the inevitable. I appreciate all your suggestions and the Win7 backup does more than I thought it did. At the very least, for those on a tight budget. Backing up to something with Win7 is better than no insurance at all. Thanks guys!!