Dan,

By the sounds of it, you simply copied all the files from your old hard drive to your external hard drive before your machine died, correct? If so, you do not want to try and overwrite the contents of your new disk with the contents of your external hard drive - you will probably be left with a very broken machine.

The difference between mirroring and backing up is significant - with a mirror image, you can simply duplicate a hard drive, boot sector and all. If you had created a mirror image of your old hard drive, you could do what you want to do and essentially duplicate your old hard drive to give you a machine in the same state it was in prior to the crash. However, it sounds like you only backed it up - i.e. Copied the contents of your old drive across to your external drive. This means that valuable boot sector information and so forth was not included, and other vital components may also have been missed.

This time, you would be better off copying across on the files you need - documents, music, video, images and so forth. If you are able to reinstall your software and/or games, you can also copy across data such as saved games - however, you won't simply be able to restore software from your old drive I'm afraid. It is technically possible to restore a machine this way, though you are likely to come up against so many fatal errors that it would be far quicker and easier to reinstall any applications yourself and just copy across your personal data.

Norton Ghost isn't great software, but it does the job sufficiently for the majority of users. In future, if you wish to make an exact duplicate of your machine for restoration in the future, I advise either using Windows System Restore or using mirroring software to make an image of your current hard drive. Backing up your data by copying files and folders to another device is certainly advisable, though is unfortunately not enough to restore your machine to its former state - there is a bit more to it.

Let me know if you have any problems or questions and I'll see what I can do to answer them - sorry I couldn't give you a more convenient solution.

John