Need machine HD cloned running Win2000 Sp1

[Rick Martin]

I'm just a humble novice maint tech looking for help. We have a machine that is running WIN 2000 SP1 and I need to create a clone of the hard drive. Because the manufacturer never gave us the original install program and they are now out of business, management wants a cloned backup of the hard drive. The computer has never been updated and is running the original software that is was delivered with. All of the other cloning software requires WIN 2000 to have the latest SP installed and re are reluctant to do that fearing it could cause problems and cause the system to fail which would make the machine unusable.

From what I have been researching it appears that Clonezilla should work for this. I can pull the hard drive out of the machine and install it in a external drive adapter attached to a laptop and run Clonezilla on that laptop. Does that sound feasible? I appreciate any helpful suggestions.

[Steven Shiau]

Well, it's possible that Clonezilla can help you.
First I would suggest you backup important data before you use Clonezilla. Just in case.
Second, there is no need to remove the hard drive from the machine. What you need is to boot that machine with USB flash drive or CD. I suggest you take an image first before you do a disk to disk cloning.
For more info, please check the web page:
https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php
Especially these:
https://clonezilla.org/fine-print-live-doc.php?path=clonezilla-live/doc/01_Save_disk_image
and
https://clonezilla.org/fine-print-live-doc.php?path=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
It's recommended you try Clonezilla live on a spare machine, or virtual machine (virtualbox, for example). Once you are familiar with the whole steps, you can do it on the machine you want to clone.
//NOTE// Be very careful about choosing the source disk and destination one when you cloning it. If you choose the wrong one, you will cry I believe.

Steven