RC, I have rebooted my pc many times over several months, the open disks have been there several months but nothing I have been able to do has gotten them to close. Yes i did go into 'my computer' and click directly on each drive letter and tried to close from there but i get this Yellow Triangle ERROR alert titled PROBLEM EJECTING USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE, In the error box it says "windows cannot stop your MS/MS-Pro USB Device because a program is still using it". But I am not using any of them. None of the usb ports that I am referring to have anything plugged into them.

Sometimes drives are finicky about the formats used to create the files it tries to read, and they get worse as they age. (sort-of like people :-) ) If this is a CD-R (not +R), see if another CD-R disk can be read by his computer. It's not alweays enough to say it can read other discs if we don't know how the others were formatted.

Your post reminds me how out of touch I have become with this kind of problem (and I am just posting about a possible win install too). However like you, I remember some things from my past and I suspect that your problem is probably a simple fix. At least for the time being, I think reinstalling windows is extreme and since you have a second working computer you should wait for some of these other clever folks to help. I'll bet there is some utility to help with this but if not, there must be a way to mnually link particular extensions to specific programs, and for the time being you would probably only need to make a couple of links (but don't ask me how).

Basically it's safe and the right thing to do, imo. If you don't run the disk check, you would risk writing new photos to a damaged area of the drive. As long the disk's file table is not damaged, probably the worst that would happen is a few bytes or sectors have some corruption, and if you're lucky, you only have one or two damaged or irretrievable photos. If you do lose access to the drive, there are recovery tools specifically for recovering photos, namely "PhotoRec" which works very well. After you get everything working again, you might think about some kind of backup system so you have more than one copy of the photos. This post was edited by kbarb on Wed, Nov 26, 14 at 16:43