Forgive me (& redirect me) if I'm not in the right place.

I have a ? about my Maxtor external hard drive. I have had so many problems with my "new" PC - matter of fact, it has just been returned to me from the mfg's repair facility. I believe they did a complete reformat, etc. since my files were corrupt and I couldn't do that myself (I can now - I've already had to do another!)

Anyway, I had copied "important" files to it before sending my PC off. Now what? I doubt very seriously that I will have any kind of success. I'm thinking I ought to just reformat the external drive and start over. How? How do I erase the drive so I can put the "clean" system files necessary on it? Does anyone have a link for me to learn from? I think once I get that done, I should be able to proceed with backing it all up, or at least getting all of those massive photo, music, video, and clip art files off my main drive so it won't be so bogged down!

Everything I know about PCs I learned by "accident" - so I don't know the best way to do a lot of things - such as saving my files, like those I said above, somewhere other than my hard drive - like on removeable CDs, DVDs or whatever. If you know a link, I'll go study. (I don't even know what to search for sometimes - "thingie" doesn't always get me the results I need! LOL)

Your external hard drive should have not been affected by anything done to the internal hard drive.

All the data should be there. There will be no System Files on an external drive unless you've set it up as a boot drive.

Your System Files are on C: which will be (one of) your internal drives.

Backing up files to a CD or DVD just requires right clicking said file and choosing Move. Or Send to: DVD/CD.

You can format drives (other than system C via Disk Management: start Run... diskmgmt.msc

Right click the right box related to the drive and choose Format.