For the benefit of all who are interested, this is how I resolved this situation.
Let me just say that I haven't had a system crash or anything bad happen - yet. It's just that I have valuable data on the pc and it's high time I did something about a disaster recovery plan.
Anyway, thank you all for your suggestions.
In the end I downloaded the Redo utility that Philip suggested from
http://redobackup.org/
This is an iso file download that you then burn to a cd or dvd to create a bootable disc with the recovery utility on it.
After you've burned the iso file to a disc, make your cd/dvd drive the first boot device and then reboot from the disc you just wrote the iso file to.
It took just a few seconds to boot into a fairly low res screen with four options. I can't remember what the options were, but there was no mouse and so I tried to highlight the options using the arrow keys on the keyboard.
Not much, - actually nothing, - happened. But in moments the disc whirred into action again and took half a minute or so to load a more hires screen which invited me to either backup and create a disc image, or restore an existing disc image.
Clearly 'backup' was my choice at this time, and the backup image can either go to a NAS or a USB hard drive or similar. It's probably not a great idea to send it to your on-board hard drive, even if you have room, for hopefully obvious reasons.
It's worth noting that this iso file can be used to boot any PC regardless of your OS or Windows version - which is handy.
So now, in the event of failure, I have the means to boot my machine from cd/dvd and I have a disk image to restore the PC to it's former glory - complete with all service packs and windows updates, drivers and so on.
I have to say I'm feeling a bit chuffed that I feel confident enough to recover should disaster occur.
Hope this helps other XP owners
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