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is it possible to back up more than one hard drive using a single external hard drive? i want to back up a external and a internal.

 

Your post is a bit vague and light on details, but I'm assuming that you want to back up the entire drive(s) and not just certain files. In either case, yes, you can back up two drives to one external. If you want to back up the entire drives, the external must be larger than the combined size of the data on the 2 drives. For example, if the internal has 37gb of data, and the external has 75gb of data, you must have a minimum of 112gb of free space on the destination drive. You can do this several different ways: you can partition the destinitation drive in to 2 partitions, and copy each drive to it's own partition, or you can use a backup tool like Acronis or DriveImage XML to create image files from each drive and then store these image files on the destination drive. These programs usually compress the files too so that will save some space. However, you will need the software to resurrect the images to a useable format when needed and they usually do this by creating a boot disk. So, in the event that you have a major failure, you'd boot to the boot disk, direct it to the image file, direct it to the drive to restore the image to, and then start the process. I'm not an expert on the intricacies of Acronis or Drive Image XML, so you'd need to find the specifics on your own.

I hope this helps! Good luck!

[dlb]

 

the reason i want to back up my drives is because

1. ever since the last time i installed windows i, long time ago, things don't seem right. i cant update to wmp 11 and since i updated to sp3 i cant open media center and cant seem to get proper help so i figure the best thing to do would be reinstall windows. so that's why i want to backup my drives.

2. i recently caught a bad malware virus and followed instructions on this forum from someone elses thread to get rid of it and and i think i was successful. funny how after i went trough the procedure i did a scan with norton and it found over a dozen virus in my registry which is whats funny because at first stupid norton didn't detect anything, not till after MGtools and combofix and all that other stuff detected the virus. but after i got rid of the ones norton found i think i was alright, i think. but just to be sure i want to back up my drives and start fresh as i have been needing to do for a long time anyway.

3. another reason is one of my hard drives (internal) is clicking and might go out any time. i just lost a full 500 gb external ignoring the clicking and i dont want that again.

do you think that reinstalling windows is the best way to go about it at this point?

sorry if this is too much info on this topic
than for the reply and thanks in advance

 

any body else please

 

If you look here you will find all the backup programs you need and the best way is as DLB said, use an external drive that is larger than the 2 drives you want to save and partition the external HD.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads3.html