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

--
Charlie, Gardening in Cornwall
Holders of National Collections of Clematis viticella
and Lapageria rosea cvs
http://www.roselandhouse.co.uk