[lthemole]

My knowledge of techy stuff is just awful..a while back I bought an external hard drive (250 Gbs) I have Windows XP on my Dell...I used their facility to do a system back up file onto the external drive..18 Gbs in all. Last week my PC crashed and Dell talked me through re-booting it back to the factory settings..of course I lost all my programs and files. Naively I thought by clicking on the back up folder would do the job..I get the following message..
'' This back up utility cannot connect to the removable storage device..etc..start removable storage device through the system services function on the management console '' What ?! I looked up this mmc. thing but am none the wiser to be honest ! Any ideas ?

[Cookiegal]

Click Start - Run - type in services.msc and click OK.

Scroll down the list to "Removable Storage" and double click to open it. Beside "Service Status" click on "Start".

The "Startup" type should be "manual".

[lthemole]

Thanks Cookiegal..tried that and it got to the stage where ' starting ' came up...what's supposed to happen next...?? Nothing seemed to happen after that at all...told you I was useless !

[Cookiegal]

That's the service that you needed to have running to retrieve the backup data. Have you tried to retrieve it again?

[lthemole]

Hello mate..just checked..removable storage is still 'started' double click on the windows back up files on the external drive and get a wizard that tells me the back up files don't exist or can't be read...maybe I did something wrong when I transferred these files initially..although it seemed straightforward and they copied to to ext.drive with no problems !

[Cookiegal]

Did you use the Windows XP backup utility to put these files on the external drive?

[lthemole]

Hello again...I'm pretty sure I did..and it transferred 18 gigabytes of stuff !

[Cookiegal]

What is the exact message you're getting now when you try to retrieve the files on your external drive.

[lthemole]

Yo Cookiegal...I got it ! While looking for the message to tell you..it goes into a restore wizard and asks for the files to restore and I just couldn't get them..the one thing and probably the first thing I should have done was go to the browse option where I found the E drive listed and opened the back up files from there ! It's a pain being so dim! Thanks for your help though..I'd probably have given up without it ! Cheers...

[Cookiegal]

Glad to hear it. You're quite welcome.

[JohnWill]

You can mark your own threads solved using the thread tools at the top of the page in the upper right corner.©

[Cookiegal]

Is that statement copyright John?

[JohnWill]

Originally Posted by Cookiegal

Is that statement copyright John?

It was a joke from long ago, never removed it.