Back up to external USB - but no drivers!

[ChrisGreaves]

I have labeled the laptop "LT7", one of three old laptops I brought home on Sunday. The C-drive folder data reads "14th February 2007" and this is a Windows VISTA system.

My first objective is to backup the C-drive to an external USB drive (300 GB capacity, formatted on my own Win11 laptop)

I plug the external drive into the Vista machine and spend fifteen minutes working my way through the "Find drivers" conversation. No drivers are found on the computer, and the automatic online search finds no drivers.
We are not surprised.
But what have I got to lose?

I start the RoboCopy backup anyway, and it is running as I type.

Question 1: So why the fuss about drivers? From my point of view I am happy; the user data will be saved to an external drive, so the family photos and text documents are intact and can be copied to the new laptop(s), and I don't care about some of the operating system files that aren't copied anyway.

Thanks in advance for comments
Chris