External Hard Drive

[Western SMT]

My external hard drive used on an XP machine for all backups was bought long before Vista and Windows 7 came out.
When I have to get a new computer probably running Windows 7 is there going to be problems extracting the saved data from the external hard drive to the new computer.

[G-CPTN]

I wouldn't have thought so. Connections (such as USB) are usually backwards compatible - and if you are only reading data there should be no problem.

There might be (I cannot say as I do not know) if the hard drive is formatted as FAT rather than NTFS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

[huppypuppy]

As mentioned before, there won't be any problems if the Windows Vista/7 machine's storage format matches the format of the files on the external drive! I have a tonne of files from my old Toshiba laptop which operated XP which load on my Windows 7 laptop! Also, all Vista software/drivers/hardware are backwards compatible with Windows 7 - how do I know this??? My modem drivers are compatible with Vista and I needed the Internet in a rush...... I chucked the CD in and installed the files and it worked!

[les turnbull]

I think FAT 32 file system was left behind with Windows 98 . XP and later OS all default to NTFS i believe.

[Matthew93]

You can still use FAT 32 file system on XP but the speed of copying and saving something on hard drive is very slow.