I ran into something this weekend when working on a friends laptop that resulted from her removing an external hard drive with out properly using the safely remove icon, she told me she only did it 2 or 3 times normally she did use the icon. And once I looked up the error on google I found many many others that had the same thing happen to them and all of them also had an external hard drive they would attach, from all the info and reading I did that was the cause. What happens is you start to get an invalid drive error message, the one she was getting was invalid drive G:\, any time I tried to go to add remove programs I got that error so could not remove out dated programs, any time I tried to install things it gave that same error, so there was no way to try to update or clean out anything. Could not install or remove due to that error. After researching I found a way to go to the command prompt and type in a substitute code and that would let me remove or install programs however upon reboot it was right back, meaning anytime she needs to add or remove she will need to do that command prompt code first, and when I looked in My Computer it showed a G: drive it was an exact copy of the C: drive it was a ghost said it had the exact same volume etc. I tried every thing I found online to try to get it to go away including some registry edits but on hers the registry items were not changed so I could not edit it. So if you do use an external hard drive and you see that you can not safely remove I HIGHLY recommend just wait till you can shut down if that is how you have to do it because you really do not want to have to deal with that ghost drive mess. for those interested the exact error was Error 1327 Invalid Drive G:\ and to make matters worse on her pc everywhere it showed the G: drive it was grayed so there was no way to change that drive letter itself back to C. Really strange but by the google search not very rare.

I'm back and searching for a good, reliable hard drive enclosure that has esata connection (for faster data transfer). I didn't realize that the drives we discussed above were only USB transfer. I had bought the Nexstar CX: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cart/view-upsell.html?ie=UTF8&HUCT=2&newItems=U35WX1CZO87WNR%2C1 But when I went to set it up, discovered that it is only USB connection. I didn't realize that by sata they meant the hard drive type - not how the external drive would connect to my pc. So now I'm still looking for a reliable hard drive enclosure - with esata connection (and actually, one with usb and esata would be great). Thanks. Lynn.

Go to the link below and download the zipped Windows 95 start up disk. Unzip to a floppy. Insert the floppy in the old computer and start it up. Hopefully during the bootup it should ask if you want CD support - you do. (It has been a while since Win95 so the memory fades) Once you are at the A:\ prompt type in format c: /s and notice the space between the : and / - this will format the hard drive wiping everything off and will install the necessary system files on the hard drive. On completion of this task, again at the A:\ prompt type setup and the install should start. Now I am not 100% sure on this with Windows 95 but it should do the trick. Before you do all this though, do you really think the grand children will use this terribly slow computer? That is not intended to be rude but kids are more savvy than we older folks and with electronic things they will not gladly settle for second best. If there is already a computer in the home then the parents will be relegated to the PII you are offering LOL while the younguns use the better machine. Here is a link that might be useful: Win 95 boot disk

It sounds like you want to move the data more then just back it up. You should be able to accomplish that with an external drive. The question is, do you have enough music or other files to warrant purchasing a 750 GB drive over a 320GB A couple things to remember, the external drives are great for a temporary storage medium, but I would rather have them on a solid medium as a backup such as a dvd. They do go bad as often as, and sometimes more often then internal drives. I have been working on computers for a long time, and I never understood why someone would back up the whole computer versus just their data. Most of the programs do not have the ability to restore your computer from a backup. You should have the setup cds or dvd from your computer so you should be able to (if needed) reinstall the operating system from scratch should the drive go bad or you get a virus that kills it. There are programs out there that can backup the whole system, but why would you want to? Raid, This is where you have 2 or more hard drives running the same data/ os. If your computer came with the ability to do a raid setup it is usually just 2 or more hard drives with the same data on it. For a detailed description it would be best to do a google search for it. There are different levels of raid. In my experience, the lower levels of raid aren't of much use. I have seen cases where the main drive dies and the data is not readable. In the higher levels of raid, it is spread out or stripped over several different drives and protects you from data loss. Over all, I think for home use it is just best to use a good backup strategy for data (CD or DVD or Tape) of the actual data and should something bad happen, you can restore the data and load the OS from scratch. Here is a link that might be useful: Raid defined