i think you could just make a image of the drive for when you need to reinstall windows ,and just backup created data on a storage drive ,don't see the need of creating image all the time . fail to...

hi ,sounds like you need to troubleshoot the card reader on the computer ,i would uninstall the reader and reinstall it first ,do this via the device manager .

also is the harddrive new, and maybe not formatted yet .and if possible changed jumpers on both the hdd and dvd rom to cable select and the drive should be able to go in the middle plug on the ide...