Tyanks Armando,  the new HD is the same size as them old one, 40g.  The new HD is a Maxtor, the old one Western Digital (this is the second one of these to fail in 3 months)

I will check out the Maxtor web site as you suggested.  The Easy CD writer was suggested by one of "us" as was Drive Image.  I am new at making a complete clone of a drive in case of furture failures and the exact details of how to do this is not clear.  I have made an XP boot disk from the XP home page.

Maybe if I back up all my data and use the Maxtor disk to reformat, then install windows XP it would work ok except for some programs I do not want to have to find and download again.

My hope is to put everything including a boot program on a CD and after formating the new HD use it to install everything I had on the new HD?

Jim