Reformatting with two hard drives

[Entropy5]

Hello,

I need to reformat my computer because it's been like 2 years and its getting really slow.

Anyways. I was creating a bunch of backup DVD's and I realized that I'm going to need to use like 10 of them to save everything that I want to save. But then I had an idea.

I have two hard drives (the second one is run in slave mode). Is it possible for me to put everything I want to save on the first hard drive, then wipe the second one. Then transfer all the stuff I want to save to the newly wiped second one, and then wipe the first and reinstall Windows?

It sounds like it'll work, but I was just wondering if there is anything I'm forgetting.

A lot of the stuff I want to save is on the second hard drive, so I created a "Save This" file on the first hard drive and did a drag and drop from the second to that save file on the first. When I do that it does actually transfer the data between the hard drives, right? I thought that it might just 'appear' to be on the first hard drive but still remain on the second (and that would totally screw me when I erased it).

Sorry for the rambling. I'm not very good with computers and I'm just trying to wrap my head around this.

I'm on Vista if that matters.

-Thanks for the help!

 

[saint19]

Hi newcomer and welcome to the Tom's hardware forum.

You haven't forgotten anything, just drag and drop the files, documents, videos and other stuffs that you want to save and restore with your new OS.

Maybe, if you can create 2 partitions in your 2nd drive, you can save the backup in both partitions, just for security 'till you restore the files.