Yes, you can fully copy two drives into one.
Yes, you can fully copy two drives into one.
I need to reset your computer completely and back up everything to an external HDD. You have about 600GB on your PC, and the HDD offers 5TB of space. I'm mainly curious if it's possible to remove all files and programs from the backup so that nothing affects your system while the drive is connected. If you're not sure, just let me know and I'll explain better. Thanks!
You can use a disk cloning software to create a disk image of your drive to an external drive... you can make a bootable usb stick with that software, connect the external usb drive and when you boot from usb stick you could say "create a disk image of internal drive and save it on the external drive as a 600 GB file" , like you'd make an ISO of a DVD disc or whatever. Depending on the disk image format, you may even be able to open the disk image from Windows using various programs, like maybe ImDisk virtual drive emulator, or other ram drive software products. Or maybe attach the disk image to a virtual machine created by Virtualbox (free) or other emulators like the ones made by VMWare See for example Macrium Reflect, which is free for home users: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree There's no risk (as long as you pay attention to the menus, for example don't agree to erase the contents of your external drive if you accidentally choose the wrong copy options) and doesn't cost you anything so you can put it on a usb stick and check it out.
Thanks @mariushm! The external drive isn’t letting files run properly while it’s connected. You should avoid issues with corrupted backups. Regarding your hard drive, you can still save and access game data on the external drive—just make sure to download Steam afterward.