Laptop backup from desktop TI 9

I've been using TI 9 with great success, and not yet seen the need to upgrade. I've just bought a netbook, and would like to backup an image of the drive to preserve the initial configuration in case of later failure. I can mount it as a network drive (currently with a crossover cable), but TI 9 can't see it (though it can see my Maxtor external drive just fine, that mounts as a stnadard hard drive).
Is there a way of mounting this as a standard external drive rather than network, or some other way of getting TI to see it? Would upgrading to the current TI version help?

Thanks so much,
Michael