Whew! I took out the replacement second internal hard drive (and the external hard drive). Rebooted - everything booted up fine. Then I shut down. Reattached the external drive - booted up - everything's fine. So does it seem that the replacement drive from WD is bad as well? (I did not put the 2TB drive back in - but it was working fine before. Again - this drive was bought for when I get around to setting up a dual boot XP/Windows 7 drive - and until my family crisis - and multiple electronic/tech failures are resolved, I'm not going to tackle that one.) Don't know why it wouldn't boot from the original hard drive when the replacement second drive was installed. Any thoughts? since it does boot with the bad drive - although it mentions the hard drive problem and allows me to select F1 to continue. At least I'm up and running - and the main, original drive seems fine. (I have used Acronis - and did a back up and incremental over the summer. Then did a full clone in December when I thought the drive was failing. But I am still quite confused by the acronis instructions - and would like to start from scratch. Now I have a 2TB external drive and would like to make the proper kind of back up. How should I do this - as the words on some of instructions Raven often links use clone at one point but seem to be talking about a different kind of back up. One complication is that the original thread for acronis 2010 - with pics - is gone now and acronis 2011 instructions are more fleshed out). I have Acronis 2010. Thank you. Lynn.

You may have a failing drive and it could be a problem to retrieve what is on it. Sorry. My only thought, if you are not technically inclined, is to take the drive to a repair shop and see if they can do anything to access it.

I think owbist is exactly right on this, they would be replacing the DVD drive, not the hard drive where all your information is stored. 2 different things. I'm wondering why you're not able to burn cds and what happens when you try to. Of course you never know, replacing the hard drive may be a cure all for those guys who don't want to spend time fixing a problem. You could go out and buy a 1GB USB Flash Drive and start putting your information on it. It would be nice to find out exactly what they are replacing before they come out. Replacing the hard drive would be overkill.

I reformatted the My Book - which went smoothly. The copied a short video. Again - worked well. Now I'm copying a whole bunch of videos - and it's taking time. I'm copying about 10-15 hours of standard definition tv shows. So far, it's been over an hour. I have no idea how long it will take via USB2 connection. The 30 minute video took less than 5 minutes. I have follow-up questions. I wonder what the best way is to back up these files. I just opened up My Documents and right-clicked one at a time - then chose the option to "send to" and selected drive e: my book. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but I don't know what it is. I tried to highlight more than one file at a time (using the shift key) - but it didn't seem to want to let me highlight more than one at a time. I also wonder if I send a file to MY Book - does that mean it's moved to My Book and the original isn't on my PC - or is it copied there? Raven - I know I should know this by now, but I don't. How do I find my firefox profiles and bookmarks files so I can copy them to the external drive? Lastly, is there a way to copy files to the external drive in such a way that I can get prompted if the file already exists? so I don't make a copy and have 2 copies in there? with many files (like pictures), I may get a prompt that says the file already exists - should I overwrite it or skip. Is there anything like that when copying files to the external drive? At some point, should I bite the bullet and buy a software program to do this. Western Digital tries to give trial periods for the following software : Memeo Autobackup, Memeo Autosync. Any reason to get these? Or any other software? Also, when I reformatted the drive, it wiped the drive clean. Is there anything (drivers, software?) I would need to download from Western Digital (to replace anything I might have erased). I know that the proprietary software that's sometimes loaded with these things (like cameras, printers) may not be necessary at all. Thanks. Lynn.