2tb WD my book essential trouble with windows XP

Hello,

First post and looking for some help.

I have a 2tb my book essential and have backed up my new pc which is running windows 7. I just plugged it in and backed it all up following the on -screen instructions.

First question is should I have formatted the drive? (as reading through some of the post seem to indicate you have to) and if so how ? I wasn’t prompted to and the drive comes with no instructions to speak of.

Second question/problem is that my old crappy slow pc  which runs windows xp has all my photos on it and the idea is to save them to the my book essential drive. However, when I plugged it in it started the set up wizard and asked for the installation disk for the new hardware, but of course there isn’t any. So how do I download all my photos on to the my book essential drive from a pc running windows xp?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Cheers pcnumpty

Is your XP up to date with SP3? If the computers are networked leave it connected to Windows 7 and copy them that way. I would copy they to the external unless you are getting rid of the old PC. It’s always a good idea to have at least 2 copies of importamt data.

Joe