I'm a tad confused: you said the USB drive was brand new - did you use them with C 7.5, or not? Can you try to do a b/u using whatever drive you used before?
All the equipment I had before... Motherboard, cable etc... the drives are new and this is the behaviour I was seeing...
I am currently running the badblock check - goign slow - 0 errors so far and 40% done. I will use an older 2.0 programmer that has an external supply and try that...
Thanks everyone.
Jerry