Making exact copy of the boot disk

It seems my boot disk is crapping out on me, leading to spontaneous hang ups. Any way to make an exact copy of it to avoid reinstalling windows and everything else? Ideally I'd just make a copy, make that my boot drive, and continue using my PC as if nothing happened. Is that possible?

You can use Acronis true image or Acronis Migrate Easy to copy a bootable partition to a new hdd or a backup drive to use when things like this happen.
Some hdd manufacturers have software that can do it for you but I cant say it will work as a bootable disk since I have never used it.
I have also heard of norton ghost.

You should be able to do this with power ISO. Just make an ISO image of the disk you wanna copy then burn it to a CD/DVD.

If you don't want to buy anything, you could use a Gparted livecd, or an Ubuntu cd since they have Gparted as well. It's free and works like a charm. Also full ntfs support.