run copy of old HD from external HD?

[Jean_dumb]

I have an older Dell Pent III Win 98 that has an old billing program on it that I still need to use a bit more. I do not want to spend several hundreds of dollars to get a new program. I can no longer find the original program disks (really old - several floppies). As long as the Dell holds up I won't have a problem, but it's acting funny at times. I got a Toshiba Satellite Win XP two years ago, but the system board just had to be replaced at an exhorbitant cost so I can't get another desktop now. Anyway, I'm worried about the Dell and I was thinking that I may be able to copy its entire HD (less than 10MB) to a Maxtor external and run it from there so that if the Dell dies I will in effect have "stored" everything. I don't want to pay a computer place to copy the Dell HD to the Toshiba because I don't know how long the Toshiba will last and I'm not about to put more money into it.

I'm pretty close to "computer challenged" myself, so I'd like to know:
1) Does this scenario make sense?
2) At my level of ignorance, is this something I can do myself (is it just a matter of "copying" the Dell HD and if so, how do I tell the Maxtor to "copy" the Dell HD?)
3) Can I run the Dell Win98 that would be on the Maxtor from the Toshiba XP (or someday a new computer that I'm sure would be XP) ? I see several threads here about problems booting up from new HD, and while I don't really understand either the questions or the solutions, it seems to be something else I should worry about.

Any responses are appreciated.

 

[Crashman]

Less than 10MB? I think you mean GB. Anyway, no, you can't do that, Windows won't run if you simply copy it from Windows, and most systems won't run the OS from a USB drive. I suggest you get another drive for your Dell and use a partition copying program such as Maxtor's MaxBlast to copy the entire partition from the old drive to a blank backup drive. Then I'd take that drive out and stick it in a safe place for storage. And if your Dell breaks, fix it, if the drive goes bad, replace it with the backup.

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[Jean_dumb]

Yes, GB. Thank you very much for the reply. You just saved me a lot of money and frustration - I haven't come across anything that advised that I probably could't run the OS from a USB connection.