Whew! I took out the replacement second internal hard drive (and the external hard drive). Rebooted - everything booted up fine. Then I shut down. Reattached the external drive - booted up - everything's fine. So does it seem that the replacement drive from WD is bad as well? (I did not put the 2TB drive back in - but it was working fine before. Again - this drive was bought for when I get around to setting up a dual boot XP/Windows 7 drive - and until my family crisis - and multiple electronic/tech failures are resolved, I'm not going to tackle that one.) Don't know why it wouldn't boot from the original hard drive when the replacement second drive was installed. Any thoughts? since it does boot with the bad drive - although it mentions the hard drive problem and allows me to select F1 to continue. At least I'm up and running - and the main, original drive seems fine. (I have used Acronis - and did a back up and incremental over the summer. Then did a full clone in December when I thought the drive was failing. But I am still quite confused by the acronis instructions - and would like to start from scratch. Now I have a 2TB external drive and would like to make the proper kind of back up. How should I do this - as the words on some of instructions Raven often links use clone at one point but seem to be talking about a different kind of back up. One complication is that the original thread for acronis 2010 - with pics - is gone now and acronis 2011 instructions are more fleshed out). I have Acronis 2010. Thank you. Lynn.

Try hooking the drive up using a different USB port if you use the same one all of the time; some times it will find it again, and everything will be fine. Once you find it, open my computer to look for the drive icon. What you need to do is make the my computer window smaller - then click the drive icon and drag it to your desktop. This will give you a new link for it and save you having to go to my computer all of the time. I would back the drive up. I've had 2 externals go bad on me, I don't use them for staorage any more. If your computer will take another hard drive, consider getting one and running everything from there. The only time I use an external drive is to back up a computer I am working on. I don't trust them any more.

Lotodig, Is there a program? Yes, Acronis is pretty good. Some members of the forum has reported external hard drives that will backup your internal hard drive without having tertiary programs. Actually, what you're trying to do or should do is clone the internal hard drive. Sounds like you've already got the external hard drive. Well, plug it in and turn it on. Now go to "My Computer". Should have something listed there for your external, a D or M or F. Assuming you have XP operating system, open one of your folders and select a file but don't open the file. Now in the top left hand of the page, click on file. A dialog or menu box will open. Somewhere in that box will be the line "send file to". Click on that and then click on the letter designation for your external hard drive. Guess what, you've now completed the first lesson in external hard drive 101. Its really simple. Rather than going through each folder and sending it to the external, get a program like Acronis. It actually clones the internal hard drive. How much of the internal do you want to put on the external? Well, how many files can you afford to lose? Why not just do them all. There was a recent thread about restoring the internal from the external. The poster was having problems and one of the questions asked was, do you have all the incremental clones cause if you don't it won't work. My experience is that incrementals take a bit less time but I simply do the full clone. I keep 3 full clones on the external and when I do the next, I delete the oldest. Its really not complicated and perhaps the hardest part is remembering when to do the backup. I use a thumb drive to keep up to date on daily minor changes and then clone about every week. HTH Bob

Another option: You could install a new, larger hard drive and transfer an image of the old drive to the new one. You'll need software to transfer the image. I have sucessfully used "DriveCopy" to do this. This requires some 'fiddling' around with both drives attached to your computer. If you are uncomfortable with hooking up two drives and setting the master jumper, then pay a technician to do the job for you. If the new drive is not already formatted to the newer NTFS system, consider doing this. Also, its a good idea to format a new drive because during the formatting process, bad sectors can be found and marked off. Most of the time, a new hard drive that is already formatted is ok, but I had one that contained a few bad sectors and that produced strange failures. However, beware that formatting a huge drive, say a terabyte, can take a very long time when the surface scan option is chosen. (think 24 hours) After an image of the original system has been copied to the new drive, set the jumper of the new drive to 'master' and swap drives. You will be left with the old drive unchanged. If this drive is less than 2 yrs old, you could use it as a second hard drive. Before installing it in the computer, set its jumper to 'slave' so that the system will not be confused about which operating system to use. Once both drives are running sucessfully, you could re-format the old drive and set it up anyway you wish. Its an older drive and probably was formated using a FAT32 table. Consider formating it to the newer improved NTFS system. The NTFS format can handle large drives. The FAT32 format has a size limitation. Many disk drives made in the last few years are larger than the size limitation of the FAT32 format. This requires one to divide the disk into two or more logical drives to make full use of it. Some external drives are formatted using FAT32 with a special extended table to increase its size range. Reformatting such a drive destroys the manufacturer's special extended FAT32 table.