IE page not found

Hello all - my first post - I had the about:blank virus - it looks like it's gone but it looks like some of my drivers have been corrupted. My IE comes up page not found and Norton keeps popping up with virus protection is not on. There's errors on the status screen and an error on my e-mail protection. I figure I can just refresh the drivers and reinstall IE. But just in case all that doesn't work - everyone keeps mentioning back up files - I have an external drive that was not connected when I initially got hit. If I connect the drive to my system for back up and my hard drive is not completely clean will the virus/trojan be copied to my external drive? I'm only going to backup my jpegs, doc, xls, pst files. - thanks - andy.