"Charlie Pridham" wrote in message
...
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.

First of all you can't just drop your old hard drive with system into a new
computer and think it will boot up from that. It won't do simply because
your new machine will use different drivers, require different registry
settings etc Your system backup is only good for your old machine. You can
add it to your new machine as a second drive and otshould read all the files
on it, but you won't be able to boot from it without doing a re-install on
it and altering the boot file on your new drive.

As far as your old machine goes any backup of data can be transferred to any
machine.So first remove all external memory (cards, drives) reboot your
computer, then stick a flash drive into a USB port (at the back) and see
whether your computer can see that.