Drive Image and Restoration

I am concerned about failure of my primary drive and my ability to restore my system.

I have a system with 2 internal hard drives and 1 external hard drive. My primary drive has Win XP as well as 5 other partitions. The second internal hard drive contains only 2 partitions. I want to install Acronis on the primary drive with backups saved to the external hard drive. I plan to create an emergency disk.

If my primary drive fails, and after I replace it:

1) Will I be able to restore my system using the emergency disk and the external hard drive if I only did a drive image of the primary internal hard drive?
2) Is it necessary to do a drive image of my entire system including the primary, slave and external hard drive if I'm only concerned about failure of the master drive?
3) Will I still be able to access data on the slave and external hard drive from programs residing on the master drive if I only did a drive image on the master drive?

Thanks!

 

1) Yes
2) No
3) Not quite sure of your intent here. But once you restore your primary drive (if you had to) whatever is on the second drive or any other drive will be accessible as normal via windows.