Creating an Image of my hard drive

Hello,

Following a recent scare when I thought I had corrupted my hard drive I realised I should keep a backup of XP at the very least. There were no system disks provided by the vendor just a preinstalled recovery utility that reinstalled Vista32 to it's factory settings, a clean install.

I've now aquired an external drive and Acronis True Image Home to provide an independant recovery solution.

When I examine my system drive I see two partitions, one formatted as NTFS and a smaller partition formatted as FAT32, the latter I assume to be the recovery utility.

Acronis recommend making a mirror image to an NTFS drive so I have reformatted the external hard drive from the factory installed FAT32 to NTFS.

My concern is that will the data residing in the FAT32 partition on my system drive be viable as an image on the NTFS external formatted drive or should I create separate partitions on the external drive and copy across like for like..FAT32 to FAT32 and NTFS to NTFS. Or perhaps it does not matter as I'll have an image of the day to day version of XP SP3 along with all my files from the NFTS partition on my system drive to perform a recovery with no need for the vendors solution.

I really want to get it right since I'll only find there's a problem when and if I have to try and recover my system from the image on the external drive.

Sorry it's long winded.

Thanks in anticipation of your expanding my very limited knowledge base.

D.

it will be fine Acronis only recommends this its not essential , i save all my images to an external FAT32 drive , my internal main drive is NTFS , ive no idea what differance it will make whether the image is saved to a fat32 or ntfs file system , what reasons do they give?