Well I have a HP Celeron 2.4Ghz and I had a WD USB 250GB HD attached.
I keep everything on the external hard drive. I had also bought a USB to IDE cable to look at hard drives without opening the computer.

I found an IDE 250 ZIP and figured I could hook it up to the cable and copy everything from my ZIP drives over to my EXT WD HD. Then throw the zips and drive away!

The first thing was the zip drive worked an showed me everything on the ZIP. I then tried to look at the EXT WD HD and the neat icon was gone and it could no longer see what was on the drive.
It showed the drive letter and that was all.

I tried to turn off the external drive with the front button to the drive and it just kept running. I tried doing an eject from explorer and from diskmgmt, still no luck with the power off button to the EXT WD HD. I do know like the power off button on the computer itself you have to hold in in long enough. Sometimes for almost a minute. But still nothing! I shut down windows and tried the button, then removed the USB cable and button still would not turn it off. As a last resort I unplugged the power from the hard EXT WD HD. I unplugged the USB to IDE cable with the ZIP Drive from the computer and restarted the computer.

The computer would only go to Recovery mode and every time I clicked on quit it came right back to Recovery. This computer was set up with a partition with Recovery info. Well I finally had to let it do it's Recovery thing! This takes EVERY bit as long as reloading Windows XP from the CD!
The draw backs are too many to list, but here are the ones that concerned me.

I lost MS Office, ETrust EZ Antivirus-Firewall-Pestpatrol and some other important programs.
I lost many drivers that I could not reinstall.
I did not lose any data on the hard drive although there was little.
I have all the program CD's and Keys but what a hassle!

Well now my EXT WD HD can not be seen at all!!! Neither can the USB to IDE cable!!!
The drivers fail every time they try to load! I am first thinking the EXT WD HD is smoked and that would be real bad!!!!!!!! Well I'll try something else. I tried the EXT WD HD on Old Betsy, Gateway G6-350. It was not easy getting online or installing the drivers, but the EXT WD HD worked!! What a relief that was. I could not get the USB to IDE cable to even be recognized by Win 98.

Back to the HP. I installed a PCI USB 2.0 card I had to see if the EXT WD HD would work. Still installation failed!!! I then reinstalled Windows XP from the CD.

Everything works! The EXT WD HD and the USB to IDE cable.
I tried the USB to IDE cable cable on both computers with a Hard drive though.
I will not attempt to hook the internal ZIP to to either IDE controller or to the USB to IDE cable!

The USB to IDE cable is a R-Driver II
EXT WD HD is a External USB 2.0 Hard Drive 250GB Model# WDXUL2500BBNN

My questions are:

Do you feel this Recovery Partition is a piece of crap as I seem to have found?
Do you think it was the Zip drive caused Windows XP and it's Recovery to corrupt?

Either answer you give me the IDE zip will never see my my computer's cable again!
I will remove all the zip data when I hook my SCSI Card and Zip back up to Old Betsy!


Mike

IMHO, yes. I'm not a fan of the recovery partition. I had an HP with it on there, and I got another copy of windows and wiped the drive and installed the other copy of windows to do away with the recovery partition and all the the "extra's" that HP puts on there. If you have the CD's, you should be able to install any and all drivers right from the CD, or download them from HP's website and install them.



Unlikely, but not impossible. I've used zip disks many times before and never had a problem. The internal drive that I had installed was a peice of junk, but the external ones were near flawless. The internal drive actually shorted out a mobo on one of the machines.

If I were you, I'd hook everything up to "old Betsy" and transfer the files off the zip onto the external drive. This way, if your old computer gets corrupted, well, better the old one than the new one! Also, I'd run a scan on the zip discs before you transfer anything off of them to ensure that there's no virus/trojan etc. hiding on there.