Help please re FreecomHDD

[wendyl]

Does anyone have one of these in use please who can help
I purchased 160g HDD just prior to Christmas and tried to do full back up but when it was scanning it got so far into my documents and then although the scan kept running it was not recording on the disk - I thought I may not have given it long enough but a repeat had the same result and I switched it off to look into later. A couple of days ago I tried again this time the HDD was not registering on My Computer and and message no Freecom found I contacted Freecom. After that by unplugging and plugging back in I got it back on. Following my problem with Windows Registry recovery and Rojash's warning that might be a warning of trouble with PC hard disk I tried again to do a full backup - again it got so far and no further. I have checked the contents of the new hard disk and now have 2 copies of the few files it did copy plus MS favourites etc. My main concerns are my Firefox bookmarks and serif files, (I have virtually nothing on MS Office), outlook etc anyway but would be in crisis without these and Thunderbird. Whist trying to locate the problem on My computer my zip drive and A drive both unused for ages are showing up as 100% full can there be some connection (neither have discs inserted)
Thanks

[rojash]

What software are you using to do the backup?

Personally I would use something like Acronis True Image, Paragon DriveBackup. or Norton Ghost.

All of these can backup the complete system, which would then give you a bootable replacement for your existing disk.

[wendyl]

thanks again Rojash. I have been trying all ways today with various problems arising including the PC locking so I couldn't close anything, tried genie soft which wants me to use CD or DVD drives E or F and not HDD G
have also been trying with Acronis that's been locking up on me too. How long should it take to process around 36g do you think?

[rojash]

Hard to say, but maybe an hour or two. If i'm imaging a hard drive via a USB port, I usually set it running before I go to bed.

[wendyl]

That's helpful. I did that last night without success but stopped Acronis when I went out a while ago because it said it was processing for maybe an hour or more and I thought it wasn't working perhaps I was not patient enough
Anyway I downloaded a trial of latest version and will try that this evening
thanks

[wendyl]

Having spent most of my weekend trying to back up my system on to my new Freecom external HDD, I today made contact (following request to them last week) with their Technical support department again taking up most of today, and they have now diagnosed a hardware failure and asked me to return it. So all my efforts with Acronis etc were bound to fail I suppose Rojash. I deleted the back up software but the media suite won't even delete!