From a previous thread I explained that I was building a computer dedicated to my learning Maya 2012 and the good news is that I am building the computer around an AMD quad core motherboard. I will probably purchase a Quadro 600 graphics card. Now the machine will be dedicated to outputting Maya related files so I can develop a handle on the work that a computer does related to Maya.

One thing I want to do is clone the HDD in case anything should happen to the computer during the course of doing the work. So I downloaded xxclone on another all purpose laptop and experimented with cloning that hdd. Both computers will run windows 7. In this case I targeted an external storage HDD. I thought I was getting a single iso image but what I got was a lot of files. I havent had a chance to study the files yet. I dont even know how to recover those files yet either.

Question
Does anyone know how to...

1. Clone an internal hard disk drive onto an external storage drive as an iso image?

2. Reformat an internal hard disk drive?

3. Recover the cloned iso image drive to another internal hard disk drive or recover the cloned iso image drive to the original but but reformated internal hard disk drive?