noob needs backup help

If you are using Windows 98, the drivers for your new USB 2.0 PCI card should be on a CD that came with the card or on the Internet site of the vendor.
If you are using Windows 2000 or higher, you can try going to Device Manager and deleting everything under Universal Serial Bus Controllers and restarting the computer. It should rerecognize the USB configuration.

If you want to backup your entire system, use Acronis True Image. It will create an image of your drive that you can restore just like you have it now.
You can opt to backup just your data files, by copying to the USB hard drive.

well few things first.

1. if you do a repair from xp cd, you will lose no data.

the repair just replaces all the xp's own registry keys with the new ones same thing with xp's files. so you won't lose no files that way.

2. you can't backup your pc, why? simple, you are making changes to windows and if you backup your windows before you make the changes, then those changes will not reflect in the backup and once your restore the backup you will wipe all the changes you have made.

you can however just backup your files and not the whole partition.

3. best way to backup your partition is to clone it, in other words, you would use acronis true image and make a rescue cd, then you would boot of that rescue cd and copy your "C" drive to the second drive. This way if anything happened you can just pop in the copy drive and continue as if nothing ever happened

again no files will be lost in the process of doing a repair. and don't trust dell techs they have no idea wtf they are talking about, only the xps techs do