Lordy, my comprehensive skills have finally left me I didn't understand one word of that. I will be interested in this reply as I have an external hard drive and a vista PC 64bit.

If you bought an external drive, it was probably already formatted. If you bought the case and then bought a bare drive to go in it, you'll probably need to format it yourself. I'm not familiar with what's available in Vista for backing up, but I would probably get an image program for backup purposes.

I recently went through the "agony" of re-installing XP operating system on a new hard drive after the drive in my computer died. I used the recovery DVDs that I had made when the machine was new in 2004. Of course, this put my drive in the condition the old one had been in back then, including all the "bloatware" that the manufacturer had installed. Then I had to do all the MS updates up to and including SP3. Fortunately, I had backed up My Documents on an external hard drive, but I still had to re-install all my programs and other applications that I had. I vowed, "NEVER AGAIN". So I found Acronis True Image on sale at NewEgg and purchased it. There was also a $20 mail in rebate offer besides the good sale price. Now I have done a full backup of my new hard drive, which includes the updated operating system. I plan to do regular incremental updates as well so that if a catastrophe occurs again, I won't have to go through two weeks of needless labor as I did this time. I'll never be without a "cloning" program again.

Grandms, reformatting is the way I use to maintain my PC and I could have it reformatted and all back on in 2 or 3 hours. I have so much free time and I love working the PC so it was fun for me. I am good at backing up and when my last computer crashed I only lost one thing and it was just a wallpaper. It is a little more complicated now because I have so much on my PC and a slower server.

I tried the to do the back up you mentioned one time, but didn't work for me.

you may want to check which format the hard drive is in if it is fat 32 you may want to change that some come with fat 32 still.

The external drive is FAT32 as is the "D" partition on my hard drive that contains the recovery files that I had burned to DVDs and used for the recovery. I know the "C" drive is NTFS, so does this make for a problem when I want put these files on a formatted disk? The external drive is a 7200RPM SATAII drive and shows up as HDD K "Untitled". I know that flash drives are also FAT32, so does this make a difference? Or is the situation different when using a "cloning" software? I didn't read anything that indicated this. I want to be sure I've done it correctly or it will be of no use to me.

You can copy from NTFS to FAT32 and vice versa, but NTFS is better, especially for large drives. If you're cloning/imaging the drive, it makes less of a difference since you're creating a few large files instead of a bunch of small ones. FAT32 is less efficient using the drive with small files than NTFS.

If the drive is currently empty, I'd probably go ahead and format if NTFS as long as you don't want to use it with any Win95 or Win98 computers.

There is also a limit of file size on FAT32 drives.

the file size limit with Fat32 is the most obvious problem, these days we have large file sizes and are backing up larger amounts of data. I prefer to set them up in NTFS for those reasons and I am not going to be working with any old operating systems so might as well.

Thanks for the comments. I think I'll start over before this drive gets too full, and format the external to NTFS.