In the past I have had a hard drive failure on this windows XP machine. I was able to buy a new drive and was able to recover what I needed from the failed drive. It would not boot up in Windows but I was able to recover emails, documents, pictures etc from it.

After a clean install of XP on the new drive and getting all my drivers and stuff installed, all my documents and pictures and programs reloaded I decided to buy another new drive. All 3 drives were Seagate drives and the new drives came with a disc wizard CD that had a cloning feature. That program was made by Acronis for Seagate.

I cloned the newly installed drive and made an exact copy of it. It cloned everything . The operating system, settings, all programs, files everything . Installed it in the computer and it was an exact copy of everything. At long last I thought I had discovered the Holy Grail in backing things up and having an exact duplicate to plug right in in the event of a catastrophic failure.

Great, removed it and secured it in case I ever had a hard drive failure again. Have not needed it but know it is available to plug in and go right from the fresh install state.  The main reason was to preserve a complete new install before things naturally get modified or changed. Sure there would be various updates to do and such but still better than beginning from scratch.

Recently I bought a Windows 7 machine from Dell while they were still available. I also bought the full version of the Acronis program and an additional hard drive same brand Seagate and same physical size. My hope was to clone the Windows 7 machine with it's new out of the box configuration as a safety precaution for the future if I ever had a problem with the drive. Installed the Acronis software fine. It allowed me to select the source drive fine but when I got to selecting the destination drive all options were grayed out and non click able. Many emails and phone calls were exchanged with Acronis Tech support. Special diagnostic reports were ran and sent to them and basically nobody in their tech support knows what is wrong and why this will not work. It has been forwarded to their software developers and I've heard nothing back.

So now my question.

I think Dell does something screwy with the operating system as far as partitioning on the hard drive so it cannot be damaged ? There were no backup discs of the operating system or Office programs. I think I will call and try to get copies of those.  Is there a way to clone a Dell installed operating system like I was able to do with this XP machine ?

A locked partition on the original drive for the operating system really does not help me if I have a hard drive failure where it will not boot up. (exactly what happened on this XP machine and the event I am trying to avoid going through again)

What should I be doing to clone or backup this new computer to save the "new out of box configuration" ?  My experience tells me that eventually there will be some unrecoverable error and having a second hard drive cloned as the original would save a lot of time and effort if that ever happens. 

Ideas or suggestions ?