Sune Salminen wrote:

Clone the drive to another drive before RMA'ing it. Then you can continue using your PC as if nothing ever happened.

Cloning the drive is a good idea. Is it possible to do the following:

My current drive is SATA, 500 GB. It's got 2 partitions on it. The main C:\ partition is about 380 GB. The amount of space used on this partition is about 80 GB. I have a spare drive, which I can use for cloning. It's an IDE drive, 300 GB. Can I clone partition 1 from the SATA drive, to the IDE drive? If this is possible, what software do I need? I'm using Windows XP Home edition. Also, my Windows XP is OEM. I think that means you can change your hardware 3 times. After 3 hardware changes, the Windows XP OEM licence becomes invalid, and you can't use the Operating System. If I remove my SATA drive, and replace it with this cloned "back up" drive, will Windows XP see this change, and "strike out" one of my three hardware changes? Thanks a lot for any advice.

As long as the partition will fit on the 300GB, you can do that.

Firstly, back up your data.

Then go get Parted Magic for bootable CD or USB stick. This is a great little Linux creation that uses GParted, among other things. You can copy a partition from one drive to another very easily with GParted. It will resize the partition to fit on the other drive as long as there is enough free space in the partition. Make sure you also set the new partition's "boot" flag as well.

One annoying thing that can happen here is the boot sector not getting copied too. This can be remedied with an XP CD. Boot into the recovery console and restore the boot sector. (the command is "fixboot"). You may need fixmbr too but I'm unclear on when that's necessary.
http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/2111p196id112479.htm