To back up your entire system so that you can restore the whole system from scratch to protect from a hardware failure like a disk, you need to purchase a software product that can create the backup and then restore it to disk. XP does not have that functionality. With XP all you can do is backup and restore your “Data†so that when you reload your system from the XP Install disk, you can restore your data from that backup. Also for a Data Only backup you need to have all of your software installation disks available to reload.
There are several products out there that you can use. You also will need an external USB disk storage drive to contain the backup image to restore from. An example of a external USB disk drive that has the required backup and restore software included can be found at this web page:
http://www.maxtor.com/en/hard-drive-bac ... -plus.html . I have used this device successfully for a few people and it is quite straight forward and reasonably priced.
You can use anybody’s external storage device for a backup and purchase your software also. Two products that I know work are Paragon Software
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/db-personal/ and Acronis True Image
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/pr ... index.html. Both of these products are good products but you have to do exactly what is described in the manual to ensure successful backup and recovery.