Migrating to Vista

If I were going to do a clean install of Vista Ultimate, should I clone my current drive or do a data backup of my drive? IF I were to clone the drive, wouldn't that mess up Vista since I would be cloning from WINXP Home?

 

I'm not sure of exactly what you are getting at. But if the question is how do I preserve my XP so I can either restore it if necessary or access my data files after I get Vista loaded then an image will work fine. After Vista is loaded you can mount the image and copy the desired data files.

You could also make a Files and Folders backup of the data files and then restore them as well but this would not give you the option to put the XP OS back into service should you want to.

A clone is an exact copy of your entire drive made on a second drive. I don't see where that fits in the process. An image is just a large file or files containing the contents of the source disk so it can be stored anywhere.