Thank you all for answering. owbist, I downloaded a program called HDD Health (recommended by Kim Komando) and that is what is giving me the Attribute seek error message. It was giving me the message about the Temp Critical and with the dust that was there, I'm sure I was headed for a crash. It said the temp ws 48 degrees celcius, so I feel very lucky that HDD Health caught it. I haven't had that message since I cleaned it out. I will try PC Pitstop when I finish here. I did a Balarc Advisor report and all it says about the hard drive is "160.04 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity",so I have to do a little research to find out what make it is. I do have the case up off the floor sitting on my desk top, but it still was very dusty. It has plenty of free space around it for ventilation. I really don't want to replace the whole set up, because this has every thing I need except smaller size and still feels like a "new" one to me, except I have a bulky 17" CRT monitor. Until now I have had zero problems with it. I think I bought it in 2004, so it isn't that old, at least for me, and it has everything most of the new ones have. I have 135 GB free out of the 160. How do I backup my bookmarks and address book? I use Firefox and Outlook Express. cboy,I think cloning to a new hard drive is what I want to do, so I might be back to ask how to do that. Thanks again

Thank you all for your help. I'm looking at the Acronis program and I'm wondering if there is advantage of buying it from the site cboy mentioned rather than downloading it from the Acronis site. Maybe they send a hard copy of a users guide book, etc.? Other than cost, that is. I see that I can get a free 15 day trial by down loading from Acronis. I have another ?. As I said I bought a WD My Book Essential Edition external drive. I tried just a few minutes ago to back up my Documents & Settings folder to it. I get the following message: "You have either run out of space, or the back up file (.bkf) is too large for this disk. Note: If this disk is formatted with FAT32, the maximum possible size for the backup file is limited to 4GB, The backup operation will stop." Then this "End of Media encountered while backing up to non-removable media" What am I doing wrong? I'm using XP, 160GB internal HD, 320GB external HD

Do you need to copy and paste things on the external HD? I shouldn't think so. Apart from the automatic backing up we have it set to do, if there is any individual file or folder we want to put on it, we simply left click on the file's or folder's icon and drag it to the icon for the external HD and it gets copied there. We installed the entire Oxford English Dictionary program on my husband's computer's external HD and it works fine, but a couple of other programs just wouldn't run right when we tried to install them on it. Come to think of it, the OED has a verification process by which you have to show the computer that you actually possess the CDs for it, and that may be why the company doesn't mind which drive you keep it on. We haven't tried downloading any programs to the ext. HD yet, but it seems likely to me that many--especially the expensive programs that don't provide for periodically proving that you have the CDs--will very likely not run well from there. However, from what Cboy writes, with the help of Acronis, it looks like you can backup the whole of your internal HD, which would include programs. So, being new to external HDs myself (a 500GB Maxtor One Touch 4), I'd like to ask Cboy if you can actually remove programs from C:\ (to save space) and then run them from the external drive instead, or if what Acronis does is only to save them so you can reinstall them in C:\ after a disaster and run them from there.

I will tell you what I go with, for my internal drives I go with Western Digital Black Caviar drives they are more expensive usually but extremely good drives. The last one I got was a 500Gig Black Caviar which I believe I got through amazon. For my external drives I like seagate free agent pro, I like their warranty and features. western digital black caviar