Yes, I remembered a few days ago that Seagate did a Backup application, so I looked it up, read about it, but then didn't fancy using it, as it's run from within Windows and is old and probably quite buggy. In my view, there's little to rival G2003 for simplicity - when G2003 happens to like the USB interface!

On the G2003 front, I'm currently working on an idea to use an e-SATA bracket in the PC, enabling a SATA port in the PC to connect to the external docking station, as the latter has an eSATA port on it. There should then be no problem in using Ghost. The only disadvantage in this would be that the destination drive, in the dock, wouldn't be hot-swappable, at least not unless and until the AHCI function were pre-installed via a floppy and F6. Mind you, whenever you clone a drive (the whole disk), you have to be exceedingly careful not to allow it to boot at the end of the operation, as you'll get a clash then with the internal system drive and the system will corrupt.

Yes, that's right, but where, in the XP version of that, can you find a folder, menu or wizard that allows you to initialise drives? There's no such facility, as far as I'm aware. But you can find the hidden initialising function for a bare drive that's just been fitted by instead right-clicking on the grey rectangle to the left, as I described earlier.

In reply to a post by meditator:

Yes, that's right, but where, in the XP version of that, can you find a folder, menu or wizard that allows you to initialise drives? There's no such facility, as far as I'm aware. But you can find the hidden initialising function for a bare drive that's just been fitted by instead right-clicking on the grey rectangle to the left, as I described earlier.

You right click the drive on the map at the bottom and select initialize... if it is already initialized that menu option does not appear. It definately exists (in Win 7 at least) as I did it last week on a brand new 1TB samsung F3.

From the XP Help feature

To initialize new disks
Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Disk Management.

Where?
Computer Management (Local)
Storage
Disk Management

Right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk.
In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize.
If you are running Windows XP 64-Bit Edition, you can select whether to use the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

The disk is initialized as a basic disk.

Notes
* To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.

* You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure.

* New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.

Yes, that's precisely what I described. The point is that, with WinXP 32-bit, right-clicking on the 'drive area' itself in Disk Management does NOT give you the Initialise option. Instead, you have to right-click on the grey rectangle on the left in which its drive no. is given.

No, you're mistaken, cheshire-man. In WinXP 32-bit, right-clicking on the disk's 'area' does NOT give you the Initialise command. Instead, you have to right-click on the grey rectangle to the left, in which the drive's no. shows. The difference is subtle but important. Furthermore, there is no Initialise dialog box; you just click on Initialise, and that's it!