On 10/31/15 10:22, Charlie Pridham wrote:

I am doing this on the machine as it appears in some respects to be
working normally, but if I connect anything with memory to any of the
USB or card slots it fails to find it and if I open "Computer" and click
on any of the external slots it shuts down and reboots so I cant do any
further back ups.

I had thought that as the hard drive was still working I could just drop
it into the new machine but I am now suspecting its the Windows coding
that is corrupted and I cant restore my back up because it wont read the
USB slots and "System Restore" doesn't work.

If I didn't want to save the data I could do a destructive restore to
the original but I have never had to restore from a back up and I am not
100% sure that having done that , that A; it would cure the problem B;
that the restore would result in me seeing exactly what I currently have
in front of me.

The machine is probably OK, but it is more likely to be a hardware
than a software problem. The fact that it crashes is because error
recovery code is broken more often than not.

Firstly, if you have never checked your backups, don't trust them.
You need to check that they can be recovered from and contain the data
you need at intervals, and every time you upgrade your system. But
that's for next time.

What do you mean by card slots, and do you have a CDROM/DVD drive?
If so, the simplest technical approach is to boot a Linux system in
recovery mode, and see what devices are broken. If that's too tricky
for you, you need a competent shop or person to do it for you. Great
skill is NOT needed, but nor are people with Dunning-Kruger.

If it is what I think, it might be possible to replace a component or
add a daughter board - it depends on your machine - and dropping the new
disk into a new machine would definitely work. But it would be better
to copy the disk or get it copied, as disks don't last for ever and
newer ones are bigger.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.