Thanks. I tried to re-designate a drive letter in disk management, but was unsuccessful. I checked out Handy Recovery, but that program only permits free users to save 1 file per day.
Edit: I believe they have a freeware version, else they used to have...
U may have to google it, because it may be well buried on their website.
Yeah, i'm very familiar with that as i use XP a lot on my machine, so when i saw your post last night,i'd thought i'd try on the brothers laptop as he's got Win7 as i was transferring files on to his .....
Maybe my ext hard drive was set by default to be Optimized for quick removal?, but wonder why you dont have that facility now on Win 7?
If I'm reading you right dave, you wouldn't be able to do it if the drive was busy, and in Win 7 there may only be one way to access this setting.
Go to "Device Manager" and right click the drive, select properties and you should see a "Policies" tab with the options on it.
The reason I pointed this windows feature out was because you mentioned your computer was 10 year old, and it may be doing something silly like going into sleep mode (if it's activated and set) at the same time windows decides to carry out a delayed write from the disk cache.
I don't know if that's even possible but you never know with windows, it may be able to mess up like that at any time, and not just with an old PC.
I have the write cache disabled on all my drives as I think it's an absolute no-brainer of a feature. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
Have a read here about Win7 and disk caching.