Personally I have used Norton's Ghost for several years. I find it perfect for coping and transfering OS's and storing/backup. I persoanlly use it as a back up method. The new version 2002 supports cd burners (and other backup devices) and will let you image a partition or the whole drive and will tell how many disks it requires all through a boot floppy! The best part you can use an image to set up from scratch a disk with partitons and all without formating, fdisking or anything else needed! I even use it to try out different OS's (and combinations, ie: dual booting, winxp, linux, win9x, etc.) on the same machine. I can have it up and running with a different OS (previously installed then ghosted to a file or restore to/overwrite) in mere minutes. I make sure that all my data is setup on different drives/partitions and that each OS (or combination) is setup with the same parameters...I like to experiment!
Using a copy program is alright for transfering your data/OS to a new machine but with "ghost" it will compress the image (or not, your choice) and will simply do so much more!
hope this helps
