HDD backup images

I have 2 hard drives atm, 1x160GB (Boot) and 1x200GB

I would like to put them both on a 1TB drive. If I created an image of each drive and then partitioned the 1TB and copied them into it, would it work? eg:

/dev/hda (160GB)
/dev/hdb (200GB)
/dev/hdc (1TB)

/dev/hdc partioned to /mnt/hdc1 (160GB) and /mnt/hdc2 (200GB)
then copy /dev/hda image to /mnt/hdc1
and copy /dev/hdb image to /mnt/hdc2

If it wouldn't work as simply as that, is there any way of doing this?

Don't even need to partition hdc, just create ISOs. You can mount ISOs directly if needed, and backing up is as easy as for x in hda hdb; do dd if=/dev/$x of=/dev/hdc/$x.iso; done.
You can just mount them via the loop device. Check the mount man page.

Of course, what you really want is incremental backups like with rsync.

>>2

thanks for the info so far

What I forgot to include in my first post was that hdc is meant to replace hda and hdb.

Rather than having to install an OS to hdc in order to mount the isos, I'm wondering if it's possible to copy both hda (including boot sectors) and hdb so I can continue using the OS on hda.