One reason I found the Acronis software at all is because I suppose I should make a clone in case my drive fails. If I use the Acronis software, do I need the WD software installed at all, or can Acronis do all of the backup features of the WD software? I read the Acronis manual and it seems pretty inclusive, but again, I’m pretty ignorant here, so ease plays a factor. I’m really new to this, and came across a couple of questions, so thought I should stop and ask before I even plug the thing in. For some reason windows does not seem to fully connect to the external hard drive unless the device is rebooted (turn off - turn on).I just bought a new WD Essential external drive that I want to use only for backing up my laptop’s internal. I forgot to reboot the external hard drive after rebooting windows. UPDATE 2: OK - problems solved (at least under Windows). I am guessing my hardware may not be supported by this product?

UPDATE: I am using version 8 trial build 826 - which seems to be current (unless the trial build is different than the full build). However I am a little hesitant to spend the money if it does not look like the product will work with my hardware. I am wondering if perhaps the full version is more up to date than the trial with respect to USB devices supported? And if so perhaps this external drive will actually work fine once I purchase the full version. So it does not look like I can specify my external drive as a target location for image archive creation. I got the same results from both the Windows executable and the boot disk executable. The notebook I am using is an Inspiron 8600 (Pentium-M 1.7) with Windows XP Pro. However when I try to create an image it sees that I have an external hard drive (Maxtor One-Touch 2 attached via USB2) - but it say that it is empty (without any partitions) and thus I can't select it as the target location of my new drive image. It installed easy enough and I made the bootable recovery CD - which also works. So I downloaded a trial copy of True Image to make sure it works with my laptop /external hard drive BEFORE I purchase the product. hard disk crash, registry corruption, etc.) so that I don't have to go through a time consuming reinstall and reconfigure everything cycle. I wish to create a drive image of my new (freshly reformatted) DELL laptop for recovery purposes i.e.

Western digital acronis boot cd