With the help of a friend who works in IT I was able to do part of this. Turns out that for some insanely stupid reason the hard drive is sent formatted for Windows 98 rather than Windows XP (if you read the small print and understand computerese it tells this in the 2 whole pages of instructions that come with the drive- but it doesn’t explain how to do it). She also had to download a program off their website to stop the damn disk from spinning so that it could be reformatted.

I was then able to save all of the info that I really needed, but for some reason I wasn’t able to perform a full system backup.

So I still need to call their help line.

Not exactly what I expected from a product that advertises itself as basically “plug and go.”