I ran into something this weekend when working on a friends laptop that resulted from her removing an external hard drive with out properly using the safely remove icon, she told me she only did it 2 or 3 times normally she did use the icon. And once I looked up the error on google I found many many others that had the same thing happen to them and all of them also had an external hard drive they would attach, from all the info and reading I did that was the cause. What happens is you start to get an invalid drive error message, the one she was getting was invalid drive G:\, any time I tried to go to add remove programs I got that error so could not remove out dated programs, any time I tried to install things it gave that same error, so there was no way to try to update or clean out anything. Could not install or remove due to that error. After researching I found a way to go to the command prompt and type in a substitute code and that would let me remove or install programs however upon reboot it was right back, meaning anytime she needs to add or remove she will need to do that command prompt code first, and when I looked in My Computer it showed a G: drive it was an exact copy of the C: drive it was a ghost said it had the exact same volume etc. I tried every thing I found online to try to get it to go away including some registry edits but on hers the registry items were not changed so I could not edit it. So if you do use an external hard drive and you see that you can not safely remove I HIGHLY recommend just wait till you can shut down if that is how you have to do it because you really do not want to have to deal with that ghost drive mess. for those interested the exact error was Error 1327 Invalid Drive G:\ and to make matters worse on her pc everywhere it showed the G: drive it was grayed so there was no way to change that drive letter itself back to C. Really strange but by the google search not very rare.

Grandms - I checked hidden icons and it wasn't there. So I just did it by turning off the computer. Canibus - since I have an on/off switch, if I turn that off, is it sufficient to do that first - then disconnect the esata cable? I did unplug it - but may have turned it off, disconnected from pc, and then unplugged power. These are such important things - the order of shut down and disconnection. It's something I never thought about until very recently - and several people I've talked to since had no idea about the safely remove hardware button - or the order of disconnecting,powering down an external drive. The people I talked to just unplugged the drive - and so far they've been very, very lucky. When I reconnect the ext. drive, just want to be sure I have the order correct: computer off connect external drive to power adapter and plug it in connect esata (or usb) cable to computer turn on the hard drive (or do I turn it on before connecting to pc?) turn on the computer I'm asking bc. I just got an external drive for my daughter's computer and the instructions don't say anything about whether the computer has to be off or on before connecting the ext. drive. Thanks. Lynn.

It really does not matter that you only need a small drive, they are gone. Replaced by larger volume drives, planned obsolescence. You could remove the existing drive from your enclosure and replace it with a new drive but the savings seem minimal. Then you have the aggravation of doing the task. You would need to determine if the current drive is 2.5 or 3.5 inches and whether it is SATA or PATA (IDE 40 or 80 ribbon data cable) As the drive appears to have failed there is no loss to your attempting to remove the drive if you feel so inclined. Tigerdirect has hard drives from $70 but they also have complete external drives for $90 so you would be saving $20 for a DIY job.

Typically the slightly fancier (read expensive) external hard drives come with more comprehensive software. That's not to say, you couldn't back-up manually, use Window's back-up software, or find some freeware that will accomplish the same thing. I would suggest sticking to drives made by Western Digital or Seagate. They seem to have the best track record for reliability. A second, off-site, backup plan is a better plan. While an external drive will be helpful in case of a hardware it won't help in the of something like a fire. There are online options or you could, depending on the size of your back-up, burn DVDs and put them in a safety deposit box or send them to a trusted relative or friend.