Hi! please help a newbie in over his head!!

First of all, thanks for taking the time to read this and help out!
My problem started with my purchase of a Seagate 1 TB device to download my Dad's old HP. Dad is 85 and gettin' old so to speak. His computer had been acting / running pretty slow and, not knowing the cause, (virus, age etc..) I elected to get an external hard drive to back up his computer before it was too late. that went ok and all seem to work as advertised.

About a week later, my Dad decided his keyboard was "sticky" and went to our local electronics store, Fry's, to buy a new keyboard. Being a guy who grew up in the depression, he always buys on the cheap and this time was no exception - he was able to get a floor model MS keyboard for 13 dollars, no box, no nothing. He got home and plugged it in and somehow wiped most of the memory and partially damaged the OS (XP). I say partially, because he lost a number of programs, as if he'd reset to restore point - but I'm also getting a message window saying XP is damaged and can't work properly when i try to open up the firewall and several other windows features. To make a long story short, i went out and bought him a refurbished HP with Vista Home Premium. I got home set it up, fired it up and all seemed good. Then I plugged in the 1TB Seagate only to have it stop in the middle of installation and tell me it could only run on 32 bit and the Vista was 64 bit. I also tried it on my new (3 week old ) Vaio laptop, also with Vista Home Premium, only to be told the same thing.

So now I am at a loss as to how to proceed and, more specifically I'm here in this community because I stumbled across this site using Google and read about all the Seagate Drive issues including what would appear to be my 1TB unit .

Could i impose on you all to give me your thoughts on the best way to proceed and some insight into how big an issue i have with Seagate Drive?

Thanks so much!
John H

You might want to go to the seagate site here: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index. [...] ee0a0aRCRD
and install this new software from seagate. it NOW supports vista 64..... This is Seagate's long overdue fix for the problem...... This should help you rtesolve the problem.... good luck :-)