I thought I could clone my C: disk and my D: disk to one big external hard drive. But every time I clone a disk it erases the destination disk completely, doesn't it.
matt

Yep "cloning" does overwrite the target drive completely.

Thanks Chris,
I'll go ahead and buy another external drive to clone my second drive onto.

Why do you need to clone them both?

I don't know. I have a lot of programs on C: I would need to reinstall, and even a lot of web pages I test locally with xampp that I would lose if my C: disk was damaged. On D: I have all the photographs I own, more web coding, documents, videos. What do you clone and not clone? Why? What do you backup? Can you back up files on a disk that already holds a cloned disk?

You only need to "clone" a disk that you are going to boot from. Data and files can just be copied.

By the sounds of it you are just looking to make backups. If so download the 2003 resource kit, extract RoboCopy and use that to copy files.

BTW cloning or imaging will only recover all your OS and programs to a running state if you put the HD in to identical hardware.

You could use SysPrep to remove the hardware drivers from the HAL before imaging the drive, it should then act like a clean install and request drivers on first start up (the same way that OE machines do)