Laurence
It's clear to me, from your answers, that your external drive is working properly and that you have set it up correctly.
However, from your answers, I have two more questions:
a) What size is the smallest partition on your external drive?
b) How old is your PC?
Now, I believe, from the error message you are getting, that your PC's motherboard could be going wrong. Simply because when defragging your external drive you should not get an error message and the process should be over quite quickly because a three week old drive would not need that much defragging, even if you used it 24/7 since you installed it.
One other thing that may help, check that you have allowed XP to index the ex HD because that will help speed up the finding of your files (see screen print below).
UK Bob |