Shouldn't be necessary to do boot-time chkdsk of an external drive though, you should be able to do that under normal windows operation :-s

Like, chkdsk d: /f/r where d: is the drive letter of choice.  It may ask you to unmount the volume first (say Yes) but then it runs in the background.

When I do a chkdsk on the external, it is finding the errors, but it reports "Errors found.  CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode." So I assumed that means I need to do it at boot time.

Nah, just means you have to do "/f", as Ralf mentioned. "volume unmount" should only happen if you have open files/folders on the drive.

Nope. The event log was the first thing I checked.

I'm at home now and I just started up chkdsk f: /f /r. We'll see what happens. Ah! as I am typing this I just saw it say that it deleted the directory that was the one I was having problems with.

Time to make some dinner and check back with it in a little while.

Thanks everybody for the help.

I think it would be cool if they could add a small G-sensor to disk drives, and hook them up to a small piezo speaker so they would issue a blood-curdling scream if they fall to the floor.