Thanks all!
After reading all the inputs i have lots of questions about "backing up" and restoring system. Lets say i had partitioned my hard drive as you guys suggested. I have a 100G partition for my system (c:\....drive) and i created two additional partitions each about 400G. Lets say my system crashes or i get a virus or something. What do i do now? Try to be as exact as possible ......i am not a newbie but treat me like one for now..........i am unclear as to how to restore my system.
OK you asked for it. LOL.
There are many programs that will create a system image that can restore a computers OS the exact condition it was in at the moment
the image was created.
Some of these programs cost money and some like my choice are free.
Clonezilla can create an image of your 100GB OS partition and because it only copies the used space the resulting image is relatively small.
It also uses lossless compression to make the image even smaller.
It is a live CD\USB flash that you boot to instead of your OS.
It runs in memory only and won't affect your HDD unless you perform a restore.
Since you are doing a clean install this is the perfect time to make a system image
If you create an image right after installing Win 7 and after performing all updates, installing all your programs and making sure everything
is running OK you will never have to reinstall Win 7 again on this machine.
You would simply restore that image and be back to the point you created the image.
Of course you would have to do updates to catch up to the present updates.
You also should make periodic images every month at least.
Keep the initial image and at least three recent images either off disk (external drive preferred) or on your data partition or both.
Some numbers, a 100 GB partition with 20 GB used by Win 7 will result in an image of about 10 GB with compression.
It will take about 25 minutes to create and restores take half of that.
The image can be saved directly to the external drive or other partition (not the same partition as the imaged one).
The latest stable .iso here.
Clonezilla - Downloads
The amd one is for 64 bit processors, the i486 one will work with all hardware and the i686 is optimized for multicore processors.
The clonezilla has a wealth of info on use etc. plus I have written a guide that is more comprehensive posted at another forum.
A guide to using Clonezilla - Scot's Newsletter Forums
You data partition, since it isn't bootable can be simply backed up by copying the files\folders to another location like an external drive.
I you don't have a USB external drive you should get one, or if you have an unused drive laying about get an external enclosure and use that spare drive.
USB 3 is getting more prevalent and if your computer is a desktop an adapter card can be installed to give you a couple on USB 3 ports.
USB3 external drives are available that read\write much faster when connected to a USB3 port.
Feel free to PM me.