backing up the computer

HAve used the M$ Backup.. and to CD-RW drive no probs.. Check that your CD RW drive is a/ recognised by the system in the Hardware Manager b/ The correct Aspi Drivers are installed (most come with XP, some with the software disk with the CD/RW)

You are trying to make a REcovery CD for Your XP Installation.. MS BAck up is not the best for this task.
You will be best creating an image of your HDD using a utility like NOrton Ghost etc..
WARNING.. A standard XP install will require a minimum of 3 CD's .. (BTW.. That is a Prob I encountered with MS BAckup is CD Spanning)

Cheers

jinxy, Und3ertaker,
Thanks for the help. I do have an old Norton disc. I'll check it to see if Norton Ghost is on it. A friend did suggest to look at that, but I was hopeing for xp to do it. I will check to see if the right driver is working with the cd burner. The cd burner came with the e-machine, so I would think it is working right, but I will take a look, again. It's probably something real simple and I've been looking at all along. Thanks.

Freddy

well i got a small trick

first save the back up in your hard disk and may then burn it in the cd , well its not the eact answer but it will work if it is soo necessary

Backup to a CDRW- A major limitation of XPs Ntbackup utility is its inability to select a CDRW drive as a backup destination. To work around this hurdle, open NTbackup, select the files to backup, then select "c:\documents and settings\username\local settings\application data\microsoft\cd burning\backup.bkf" as the backup destination. When the backup finishes, Xp will prompt you to write the files to the CDRW

It may be like hunting a mouse with a shotgun but here is a trick I used with my system in school. I put a second drive in it and used Ghost to simply clone my drive. I installed another power switch in the back to control power to the drive. My room mate and boy friend were always messing with my system. If you use an adaptec SCSI card and SCSI drives it is much easier to create a cloned drive to use as a recovery source or even to boot too when your in a crunch. You can use the SCSI controller to point to the drive you want to use. On my work system I simply use several AT commands to clone my drive. The *.bkf file has not been good at capturing the system state in an ADS environment in my opinion.

Sorry if I was too wordy but good luck to you.

I'm giving tejaswyappalla idea a try. It sounds like the simplest idea. It will probably work. Thanks to you all for the great ideas and help.

Freddy