I had my old drive that was in my original HP Pavilion computer. I was told that the drive had crashed about 2 years after I had gotten the computer. Well I just put the drive aside and forgot about it until recently. I hooked it up to the Sabrent 5 in 1 Cable to Serial ATA transfer thing and hooked everything to the drive and then plugged it in to the USB port on the tower of my home built computer. It was recognized and I was able to reformat it. Now I just need to get a new hard drive enclosure.Thanks to Owbist and Terry I was able to do it without having to call my son and bother him with a lot of questions.

Intersting Jean, because that's the kind of flash drive I am using, (a Cruzer one). I haven't used another kind yet, so will have to experiment. Yes, it is an interesting comparison to other appliances I have around the house. Like a coffee maker for example, that has a green light for on. It is OK to unplug it while the green light is on, but it still means the device is "on" which to me says the program that supposedly disengages the flash drive doesn't work. It would be like having the "Off" button broken on your TV. Yes, if you wanted to turn off the TV you could uplug it and then plug it in when you wanted to turn it on, same with a lamp or something. Like I said, I'm not worried per se, just curious as to what is going on inside the computer.

Owbist, thanks I do like the fast boot on W8 - even with the switch to Desk Top, which to my simple needs is like being back in W7, it is a much shorter wait to start browsing or getting email. Mikie, not sure I "know and love" playing with the BIOS, but in the past I have had occasions to need to. Mostly that goes back to W95 days. Or even the 3.x whatever was before '95. You seem to be suggesting a 3rd party recovery tool. As I noted Gateway provides a tool to image the HDD as well as restore to factory fresh - as I have already uninstalled Norton I assume that would be Factory Fresh less Norton which is fine with me. What I miss was W7 had a DVD boot capability and Toshiba provided me with the tools to create a repair DVD, separate from a restore DVD... I liked that, it prevented me form doing damage by clicking on the wrong button. I suppose the Gateway restore doesn't proved direct access to F8. I do recall tapping F8 during a boot in XP and earlier to get into the BIOS..you seem to be saying (to my reading) that W8 doesn't let one get to the BIOS until the password is satisfied. I don't know if that is different in W7, I have never gone to the BIOS in my W7 machines. I have had to boot the Toshiba notebook off of the Repair DVD a couple of times and it saved my "bacon". On Password, in W7 I could easily change or remove the password.. that seems to be buried deeper in W8. Is it even possible to run W8 without an administrative password protected logon? My giant 17.3" Gateway will likely not be taken out of the house, a password isn't needed - well if a crook breaks into my house it would be better if I has some protection on all computers... problem is W8 ended up with a very complicated password that resulted from my initial start up of the machine..as I recall it had something to do with a password for my Microsoft account, and being external I wanted a secure PW, in fact MS may have required it.

I have two of the exact readers that you have pictured Randy. My computer will not recognize them. I have a SD card plugged in, the computer knows I have plugged one it, (makes a chime) but it does not show up. When I click on Drive F or Drive G (depending on which port I am plugged into) it says PLEAE INSERT DISK INTO DRIVE F: or G: The card(s) works fine (in other readers) and the USB ports work fine. I can put a different type reader in the drive with the same card - no problem - but these blue readers don't work. I have tried them in 4 other computers, just to make sure it wasn't mine. I have the older USB, but the readers didn't work in 2.0 ports on other computers either. I thought maybe it was 2.0 compatibilty issues. I got my readers free with cards I had purchased on eBay. The cards work fine - so I just chalked it up to faulty readers.