Since all hard drives may eventually fail, I thought I'd copy everything on PG's 160 GB UltraPakPlus hard drive onto another USB drive, so I could tuck the drive PG just sold me safely away and use the copy. To be the copy, I chose the USB drive PG had sold me with BIAB windows 2009; I kept its NTFS file system, did a quick format, then did a "select all" on the new drive and dragged its files over to the copy.

Well, it didn’t work. I got a warning that the new PG disk contains some invisible files, so I went into the control panel folders settings, and told it to make all files on PG's drive visible. I tried again to select all, then click and drag everything to the other hard drive, but it still didn’t work -- some files copied, but some didn't.

Do I need to do something else here -- if I want to get everything copied and have the copy work exactly like the original? I am aware that there are products like Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, Clonezilla and others designed to do this job. Do I need such a solution?

These are admittedly basic questions, but I'm more familiar with the Mac world, where I would probably use a product called SuperDuper to clone a Mac drive. In fact, I'm actually using PG's Hard Drive and attempting to make a copy in Windows XP, running on an Intel Mac via VM Ware's Fusion -- but I have no reason to believe things shouldn't work in the same way as they would with Windows XP running on a "true" PC. (The Mac OS actually can't write to or even format NTFS, but it can if its running Windows XP in a virtual environment.)

Advice? (I presume that making a backup, my only intention here, is within PG's license agreement.)