just purchased a new maxtor 500gb external hard drive from fry's. everything loads okay, disk manager sees the drive, icons appear on my desktop, can format the drive, but that's it. won't let me perform setup or backup or anything else. no tech support on weekends and of course fry's answer to anything is bring it back we'll give you a new one. any suggestions????

Any error messages? What exactly happens?

no error messages, just nothing happens when i click set up. when i hit the maxtor icon or the rochester hd icon the backup now prompt appears. then when i click the backup now prompt the setup screen pops up and when i hit setup, nothing happens

You said: "Can format the drive" ... Does that mean that you did format it? To NTFS?

Can you access the drive in anyway? Can you move/copy/send a file there via the standard XP channels?

attempted to do a copy paste of c drive to L on my computer. started fine but after about three minutes it stopped and said can't copy file as it is in use or something. nothing else except my desktop is open.

What about one file? TEST.txt or anything?

What I was wondering was if your computer was capable of interacting with the drive at all by trying to just move a test file.

If it is interacting that would suggest the backup software is the problem and not the drive.

Also you cannot move or alter C: while you are using it (C:\).