master hard drive dieing, can I copy it to slave drive?

[lostinsanity]

Hi, I have an issue, my main hard drive is about to die, and I need to try to copy it to my other drive so I can take it out and just use my other drive as my main drive and boot windows etc. from it.

Is there a way to do this? I already have stuff installed on my second drive which I don't want to lose so I don't want to have to format it in order to install windows onto it.

If there any way at all of just copying everything from my dieing drive to my other drive so I can just take my main drive out and use the other as a main drive.

My main drive was a temporary replacement for my last hard drive that died, it is only 40GB IDE, and my secondary drive is  a 250GB SATA (if that helps) I am also running windows XP pro SP3.

If you need any more info, I will do my best to tell you anything you need to know

Thankyou in advance.

[Karnac]

http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/2007/04/23/how-to-slave-hard-drive/

[2x3i5x]

or you could try imaging the drive in question to the new drive

[Wormwood]

Advice http://www.auslogics.com/en/blog/2009/07/puresync-backup-and-synchronize-your-files-for-free/ and http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-clone-and-copy-your-hard-drive/. Hope it helps.