Charlie Pridham wrote:
My main machine is playing up, I have ordered a new one but want to
extract as much old data from the old one as I can. Its a PC running
Vista
I have a full back up on an external hard drive. I do not have Vista
on disk its in a partition on the hard drive. I also have a year old
mirror copy of my hard drive but that also is a USB type connection

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.

Any help would be gratefully received

Try this:
Download and install Superantispyware free.
There is a repair option which includes repair system restore. On this old
XP machine system restore had not worked for years. I used the tool and it
now works fine.
Worth a go?