A few weeks ago I exchanged my 80 gig drive on a Dell leptop for a new 160GB
drive. The very first thing I did was run Complete PC Back to a 160 GB
Seagate External HDD. Once the drives had been swapped I then booted to the
Vista Premium install DVD, went to System Repair and restored the backed up
image to the new, larger HDD. External USB drives should not need "drivers"
unless the enclosure manufactuor does soemkind of "weirdness". Sorry ...
don't know how else to describe it. I've used Complete PC Backup to maintain
images of working drives both at home and work and have used Seagate branded
external drives and HP branded external drives, 160G, 300G and 400G, and
have never had problem in Vista Ultimate finding the exteranl drive.

Were you restoring to the image to the same size or larger drive?

--
The personal opinion of
Gary G. Little


"Paputxi" <Paputxi@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:6452B4A9-61B6-4CBF-BD31-195E881540A8@microsoft.com...[color=blue]
> Thanks for the feedback. I'm replying back in case anyone else encounters
> the same problem.
>
> I checked with the manufacturer of my external HD (Seagate) and turns out
> that they don't provide an driver for that use. So, I've had to go to
> plan
> B, which is to copy the image over to an internal drive (my image is
> 170GB;
> so they can be rather large).
>
> Guess the "Lessons Learned" here is NOT to backup an image to an external
> drive, particularily if there's not a driver available that can be loaded
> by
> the Vista DVD repair process. Hindsight's a wonderful thing, isn't it?
>
> Thanks again.
>
> "Jerry Grabill" wrote:
>[color=green]
>> When you reboot your system, you have an opportunity to install drivers
>> and other things. watch the screen immediately on rebooting. This may
>> help
>> you
>> --
>> "Paputxi" <Paputxi@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
>> news:B5586D10-8F37-4141-9FD6-2FCC2C4328F4@microsoft.com...[color=darkred]
>> >I created a backup image to an external HD using Vista's backup program.
>> >My
>> > system crashed so I am trying to restore my system to a new HD.
>> > However,
>> > when I select to do a complete PC restore after booting from my Vista
>> > DVD,
>> > Vista does not find my image. It is unclear if it doesn't see my
>> > external
>> > drive or if it just can't search the external drive for the image,
>> > which
>> > is
>> > in a folder that I named. Any suggestions on how I can get my Vista
>> > DVD
>> > to
>> > allow me to select where the image is? Or, how can I determine that it
>> > does
>> > indeed see the external HD, which other applications like Acronis and
>> > Copy
>> > Commander do see it when I boot from their CDs?[/color]
>>
>>[/color][/color]