Hi Bob,

Thanks very much for your reply to my problem.
Personaly, I do not think your questions are silly, certainly not for a moderate understander of PC's
Anyway here are my ansewers and some other stuff:

1) Yes LW sees the drive and where to store music files/
2) Yes the drive is formatted to NTFS
3)The drive is partitioned
4)Yes the are directories on the drive.
5)Yes, I am XP
6)I am running USB 2
7)Drive letters are correct
8)I switch the external drive off when I switch the PC off
9)The drive is new (3 weeks) and is 160mg and there is 129mg available.
It's a Western Digital.

Now I have been having some minor problems with the PC doing strange stuff. It often stops doing things and sometimes will not connect to AOL. I f I restart the PC it works ok.
I tried to defragment the external drive to see if that would help.
When I clicked on "Defragment "G" drive ( the external drive) I just get the following error message:

"Disk Defragmenter cannot continue Defrag because there is corruption in file: G:\system volume information\_restore{3405xxxxxxx}RP621."

I have tried to find this file to see if I can do anything with it but if I search fo the file I cannot find it on G drive or anywhere in the PC?

Laurence.