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.

I have an external Western Digital 80 GB drive and have had no problems for 3 years (after I did a surface scan on it). I recommend a surface scan before using the drive. My drive had a few bad sectors that had not been marked off and these casued some pecular problems until this was discovered. It took 30 min to 1 hr to do a thorough surface scan but was well worth it. I noted in your post that you intend to have 'programs' as well as data on this external drive and may use this drive on another computer. Beware that if the programs are "installed" Windows programs, this may not work. It may work if the programs are of the stand alone variety such as code for BASIC, complied FORTRAN, or Visual Basic embedded in an EXCEL work sheet.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. My computer has been warning of USB device that it does not recognize every time I log in with my password. Today with your advice I unplugged the power lead from the drive and the computer did audible blip. Reconnected it. Unplugged the USB cord at the drive, audible blip, reconnected it audible blip. Disconnected the USB at the back of the computer with audible blip and reconnected at the front with audible blip and the light on the drive is now ON! My Book J now again shows up on the Computer window. Need to move the USB connection back to the back of the computer if possible as the two front USB ports are often used for other things. I am left wondering exactly what happened to make it stop working. Thanks for your help.

I still haven't done anything with the drive as yet. I also have Acronis True Image, version 9. I have used it with an Iomega external drive that I have with my desktop computer. But there are things about it that I find confusing. That's why I was wondering about just using the Windows 7 backup since I thought I understood that it was an imaging type of backup. So what is the difference between "ghosting", and "imaging"? Do both do "clones" of the OS? I want to keep things as simple as possible. Owbist, if I do not intend to use the software that is on the drive, I do not need to copy it to the computer HDD do I? Yes, I do understand using a different drive letter for the external drive. With my desktop, that happened automatically. Don't know whether the Acronis software did that or the Iomega drive itself. I have three USB ports, so I think those have drive letters also. I just don't want to have to be re-doing something that should be fairly simple (I hope).