Hard drives - I have 2, can I back up onto the 2nd one??

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Computer illiterate needs help!!
I want to back up my digital photos and have heard people suggest onto a separate hardrive. I've looked in MY Computer and see that I have C drive where everything is and "I" drive. I thought I could put things there, but when I tried to open to look at what was in there a message came up saying something like ... go away back up files are in here...
Does this mean that I can't use this to save back up files in??

Are you sure it's another hard drive? When you go into 'my computer', is it listed under hard disk drives?

yes, just looked again. it's a D drive (not I, sorry). The C drive is called Presario C and the other one is also listed under Hard Disk Drives and is called Presario-RP (D.
Does that make sense?

When you say you have 2, do you mean you plugged a second one in, or that my computer just displays 2?

If you have a second one plugged in, unplug it, then re-plug it in again. A box should pop up. Select "View files and folders in Windows Explorer"

Open up my computer again (in a second window) and locate to find your photos. Then put all the photos you want to back up into a folder, and right click the folder and click copy.

Click on the other windows explorer (the one of your plugged in hard drive), right click and click paste.

When you right click on it and go into properties it will tell you how much free space you have on it. I think you will probably have to partition it if you've got used disk space on it.

I don't have a separate thing - they're both listed on My computer under Hard Disk Drives. Sorry, I'm not very good at explaining this!!

Just did that Ranting and it seems it doesn't have much space on it - 4.84 GB used and 624 MB free. I'm guessing this won't be enough to act as a second hard disk. Perhaps I need to get one of those separate portable storage devices?

Possibly not. I have a portable hd for backing up, it's bloody brilliant, just plug it into the usb port and it updates everything.

ok, think I'll do that! Thanks so much for your help!

Your "I" drive sounds to me to be a Restore Partition - that is, if you want to restore your computer at any point back to how it first arrived, you can do so. There is also some software called GoBack which may be responsible for this "I" drive, which will enable you to GoBack in time. So if you install something and the computer then does not work as you would expect, it may be possible to GoBack to before you had installed it.

Backing up Photos - Easiest thing I think is to use a USB Memory Stick, you can get them at quite low cost these days - so you could have a few of them and split photos into 'albums'. Then within each 'album' (memory stick) you have folders - so in the family album you could have a folder for each individual member, plus a general folder, for when photos are of multiple people.
Have fun sorting and backing up your photo collection.