Making a back-up of your Windows operating system is always useful in order to restore it, if, for example, there is a Windows crashes due to a virus attack or a hard disk failure. There are several tools like Norton Ghost for creating exact clone of your hard disk, but costlier, here is a freeware program that makes a self-bootable clone of a hard disk in a user friendly interface that’s very quickly.

XXClone is a good freeware program that duplicates the Windows system volume and makes the target volume self-bootable very quickly and easily. This program supports FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS partitions of Microsoft Windows NT4, 2000 and XP and supports internal disks -IDE, SATA, and SCSI as well as removable disks such as USB, Firewire, etc.

Moreover, the source and the target volume need not be of the same file system. That is you may copy a FAT volume into NTFS volume and vice versa and still make the target volume self-bootable.

The program is simple to use and is suitable for novice and experts alike. It does the operation in Windows interface; most of the other similar programs require a DOS interface. The Freeware does not support any of the incremental backup options. Every clone operation will be a fresh, full backup that takes a long time. You can download the program from www.xxclone.com