[CIA]

Not sure where this goes... Here's the quick version tho.
Nuking and paving a friends Windows XP laptop soon. She's backed up her important data on data DVD's. She has a little 30gb drive in it, and I want to back up the whole drive onto my mac as an image. I can easily pull the drive out of her laptop and stick it into a 2.5" firewire case I have. If I mount it on my mac and then make an image of the drive as a backup on my comp, is there an easy way to restore it to her laptop if she desperatly needs something off it? I figure I'll hold onto the data for a few months untill she is sure she has everything. Windows has a habit of saving things in wierd places, and she might not notice she's missing some document or somthing untill awhile down the road. She needs a clean install of XP and just wants to be sure her bases are covered.

[harrisjamieh]

Why not connect your mac to her laptop using ethernet / firewire, and make a folder on your mac, and copy everything on her C drive to the folder on your mac. Its easy, does what you want to do, and if she figures out she has lost a file during the re-format, she can give you some details of the file, you can do a quick spotlight search, and send the file to her via email. Easy.

[CIA]

Yes that would be the ideal solution. But part of the reason I am nuking and paving her machine is the network (wired and unwired) are no longer working, as well as the CD/DVD drive, and several other random things. (I know the CD drive works as it will boot off an XP cd, but won't see the disc if booted off the hard disk)
Also the machine takes about 15 min to start up for some reason.

[harrisjamieh]

Right OK, well still do what you were going to do and pop out the HD, put it in a caddy and hook it up to your mac. Then just copy the entire drive contents as per the way i detailed above.

[jasong]

If the OS is corrupted (which is what you are indicating), then backing up the drive, wiping it, and restoring your backup won't solve anything. If all you are trying to do is save your user data, then I would use the Windows XP migration assistant and backup that folder only for later restoring.

[Chips G]

I second harrisjamieh's idea, easiest and most convineint (as far as I know, and it will make sure you don't leave ANYTHING behind if you copy the entire HD)