Yellow Laptop Y U No speak to me?

I unwrapped my latest present to myself. It's an external Hard Drive. My beloved yellow laptop, the one in my profile picture is dying. So I need to rescue it - or rather the data it contains.

So I plug the hard drive in the USB port and it tells me it wont mount.

'Ah,' I think, 'faulty product' so I try it in another computer. It works first time! I try a usb stick in the port, it fails to mount. Then my keyboard packs up. OK so now I have a computer that wont take any external hardware and no keyboard. I am either going to have to burn all 100GB onto loads of DVDs without the assistance of a keyboard, or I'm going to have to figure something out. Some people would have taken the hard drive out and put it in some sort of case, but I know nothing about computers so I couldn't do that.

I decide to google the problem I click on the browser, only then did I remember that the keyboard wasn't working. I

'Ah," I thought, ('ah' being one of my favourite thought expletives) 'I have a new laptop in the corner.' 

I switched it on. It is connected to the internet. So is my yellow laptop. There must be a way to get them both to chat....after all I send e-mails to other computers all the time. So I ssh into yellow laptop. It's still all there. I then type tar -cf home.tar home/.

Apparently tar is like a zip file. The bit after 'tar' is 'c' for create and 'f' for using the following name and then home/ is the directory. Once done it seems the tar was there! So I logged out. Then  I types sftp followed by my username and ip address. Then get home.tap. 10  minutes later I unzipped the entire contents of my homedrive. I sshed again and typed 'shutdown -h now' (If I had wanted to restart I'd have typed shutdow -r now) Just because I wanted to watch my other computer shutdown remotely.

Anyway like I said I don't know anything about computers.