If your partitions are set up right, his is a simple procedure that should take no longer than 20 minutes to a couple hours, depending on how many terabytes you have on the drive. (a RAID array can hold many TB of data, and take much longer to transfer than a single 120GB drive) 10 to fifteen minutes if you only need to wipe the OS partition, which is most likely.

 

You should have a minimum of 2 partitions. One for your OS and programs, and one for all your data and runtimes. You need at least 2 partitions on your backup drive. One for your data and runtimes, and one for your images.

 

Simply backup all your data (includes runtimes), write across your hard drive with a bootable erase program like HDDerase, restore your OS/programs image, Create a new partition for your data on the clean drive, and copy all your data back. Of course you don't need to worry about copying your data back if you only had to wipe the OS/program partition.

 

Obviously this assumes you keep valid images of your OS/programs from a time when you were trouble free. If you don't, you will have to re-install everything from scratch.

 

Also, if your computer isn't set up like this, and it has your data in the OS partition, but it is running trouble free, you can still set it up right. Simply copy all your data to another place to make room for a Data partition, make sure everything is present and OK in the secondary place, delete all your data from the OS partition (by data, I mean only personal data and runtimes- not program data), shrink the OS/Program partition to make room for , and create a Data partition, than copy your data to the new partition. You will have to point Poser to the new runtime directories, since the drive letter won't be C anymore.

 

A couple things to remember: Images are fragile, so they must be originals, and never moved or defragmented, or they won't be reliable. For this reason, it's best to make a 40- 50Gb partition on the inside edge of your HDDs to store a few snapshotsin each drive. Tell your defrag tool to leave your image partition alone.