Preparing Backup-Drive

[europanorama]

I had a hard way to make my system recognize three drives. sometimes it hanged.
i can eighter use all three drives or only two to backup systempartition of HDD2.
HDD1: using acronis true-image-wd-version.
HDD2 using acronic true-image, containing donor-systempartition.
the same partition i described elsewhere which has an error. chkdk did not help.
HDD3-backup drive 200mb WD Caviar

Prepairing or understanding how to prepare hhd3 was a real pain. or still is.

dban used then formatted in winxp. showed errorfree but risky!
not yet formatted at that time. somewhere i have read that formatting is not needed!
is this right when copying whole drive?
since drive was greyed-out i knew this could not work.

2. formatted using repair-console. but when i showed it up in windows, its showed no formatting.
format now made but its a dynamic drive.
dont i need a basic-drive?

btw: its much more complicated.
aim was copying almost complete orginal drive -5 partitions(minus one)
to a second drive but first i must format one partition since there is an error.
data already evacuated.

so i started setting partitions and copied(with ghost) systempartition to first partition.
but drive didnt bootup.
3. Now i am about to copy the same systempartition to the formatted drive.
do i have to delete and set basic drive or not?
sorry if its a bit complicated.
i couldnt find a diskmanager. is there a universal one around?
want to prepare outside windows. Thanks
update: cannot clone to dynamic drive. its greyed out.

[europanorama]

cannot see dynamic formatted backup-drive hdd3 in mycomputer.
have now deleted /converted to basic drive. should i set primary-systempartition must boot-up-
or extended?

[europanorama]

Backupdrive is now basic and active.
this should work.

[Train]

Dynamic add the space to another drive.

basic and active leaves it with its own name/partition letter.

[europanorama]

I am now surfing on the cloned partition. HHD not yet partitioned.

Maybe prepartitioning will work.

Acronis true image cloning did not work but ghost did.
Despite acronis sayings cloning partitions or drive and "uncheck" non-system-partitions to copy only systempartition is not working at all.

2. Second partition of original hdd is backup. How can i find out how old that copy is?
Will now train other procedures on other backup drives.

[Train]

R-click the image and select properties.