External HD backup problems, help!!

[mikehende]

Hello everyone I am new to this forum so please bear with me. I have a laptop that I use for music when travelling and would like to back up evrything on that laptop unto an "External HD" so I will always have the info stored safely in it under my bed and can retrieve all of the info if my laptop should ever get stolen, damaged e.t.c. I also want to be able to transfer what's on the external drive into one of my Desktop pc's so I can have easy access to my music when I am browsing the net.
I was told that I need a "Drive imaging" software that will back up everything on my laptop, OS and all and was directed to Norton Ghost 9, asked them if this will work with their software, they said "Yes" so I bought the external HD and the Norton software and was succesfull in transferring the Laptop's data into the external HD but when I tried to transfer from the external drive into one of my Dell desktop pc's, that's where the trouble began. Norton's Techs told me to change the "Jumper" settings to make the external HD the "Slave" so I called Dell to inquire on how to do this.
The Dell Tech told me that it is possible for me to transfer the data from the External to the desktop but IT WILL NOT WORK, that I will receive more problems than I can handle. He said that when you back up an "image" of a drive then you can only recover or install back into a pc with the exact same physical aspects if it is to work properly, so in this case, seeing that I copied the laptop then I can only transfer from the external drive back into either the same laptop or a new but exactly the same laptop.
I am now looking around for any other software that will allow me to use the external HD for backup but every "transfer" software I've come across has a problem with backing up on an "external" HD for some reason. They say I can transfer directly from the laptop to any Desktop but NOT from any external HD.
I don't neccessairily have to copy the OS of my laptop, I only need to copy the programs, files and registry settings but I can't get my money back for the external HD and would like to use it for this purpose, so can anyone reading this PLEASE provide any help/links/advice e.t.c with this issue? I have been at this for a couple of weeks now and I am very frustrated, will deeply appreciate any input, thanks.

 

[mikehende]

ok, it looks like there is no remedy for this so let's try something else, I've heard of people using external HD's as an optional drive so seeing that I have already copied the image of the laptop unto the external HD, if something should happen to the laptop or if I wish to use a desktop pc instead later on, can I use the external with all of the programs that's already in it as the main drive? If so, how please? Do I have to install an OS in it?

 

[GavinO]

When you tried to use Ghost to copy the drive image, you were trying to transfer to a host with radically different hardware (the desktop) from the original machine (the laptop). Even if the transfer had been successful, I'm pretty sure the Windows install would have been too squirrely to work with. If you just want to keep the image (but not actually use the image) on the desktop, you can copy the .gho file from the external drive to the desktop and back without incident.

As for backing up using an external drive, backing up programs and registry entries is pretty much impossible, short of the Ghost system that you tried (which only works restoring to identical or very similar hardware). Usually a backup consists only of a periodic copy of your data, while a Ghost image is taken immediately after installing the OS and your applications (so that you only need to restore the image rather than reinstall each program again).