In the situations where we experienced I/O failures with HP notebooks + WD MyBook USB drives we tested using MyBook USB drives which ONLY had USB connectivity.  Therefore, as the MyBook drives we were testing with did not have FireWire or eSATA ports, we have no information for you regarding MyBook drives that have these additional connection options.  It's important to note that we experienced these I/O failures when testing the system WITHOUT any of our software installed on it, using standard disk I/O test suites like IOMeter (from Intel).  The volumes on the MyBook drives were formatted with NTFS.  The tests were with XP Pro SP2.  The problem itself is that if an application wrote data to the MyBook drive, DIFFERENT data would end up on the disk.  So if you went back to read the data you just wrote you would discover that it would be different than the data you instructed the OS to write.  These results weren't just on a single HP laptop+WD Mybook combo.  We had multiple laptops and WD MyBooks, and switched them around, and still repeated these errors using IOMeter (again, our own software was not installed during the tests).  The point is that this is not a ShadowProtect-specific issue.

My gut feeling is that if your computers have eSATA ports then you will likely not experience this issue if you connect your MyBook devices using eSATA.  It likely has something to do with the USB controller or bridge chip on the HP and/or the USB chip on the MyBook itself - some incompatibility between them.

To disable (but not uninstall) ShadowProtect, simply perform the following steps:

Run services.msc (the service control manager GUI) and stop and disable the ShadowProtect service and also stop and disable the StorageCraft volume shadow copy provider service.

Run regedit.exe and disable the StorageCraft snapshot driver by setting the REG_DWORD Start value of its service key to 4.  That value is here:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\stcvsm\Start

Also within regedit.exe disable the StorageCraft mount driver by setting its REG_DWORD Start value of its service key to 4.  That value is here:

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sbmount\Start

Run the cmd.exe shell (aka DOS box, aka Command Line Shell) and use "cd" to change directory to the C:\Program Files\StorageCraft\ShadowProtect directory.  Then run the following command to unregister the StorageCraft mount shell extension DLL:

regsvr32 /u sbimgmnt.dll

Finally, reboot.  After the reboot, nothing from StorageCraft will be running on your computer.  Two years later you can reverse these steps to re-enable ShadowProtect:

Run services.msc and enable start the ShadowProtect service.  Also enable and start the StorageCraft Shadow Copy Provider service.  Ignore errors (the shadow copy provider may complain that it can't find the snapshot driver - no problem - that's because you haven't yet enabled it - we will do so below).

Run regedit.exe and change the stcvsm\Start value (referenced above) to 0 and change the sbmount\Start value (referenced above) to 1 or 2 (either will work).

Run cmd.exe and change directory (cd "\Program Files\StorageCraft\ShadowProtect") to the storagecraft directory and execute the following command to register the mount shell extension DLL:

regsvr32 sbimgmnt.dll

Finally, reboot.  After the reboot, ShadowProtect is fully re-enabled and functional.