Good point about the cable, I did try another cable at the time but it produced the same symptoms. Interestingly my wife brought it to me today and said it had run out of battery. I recharged it. I also saw a post suggesting doing a "chkdsk /f" from the windows command line (I think it was a post by you as well). It didn't report any errors
H:\>chkdsk /f
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Cannot lock current drive.
Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Chkdsk may run if this volume is dismounted first.
ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID.
Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N) y
Volume dismounted. All opened handles to this volume are now invalid.
Volume Kindle created 01/01/2098 20:53
Volume Serial Number is 0001-25AE
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
1,599,041,536 bytes total disk space.
4,096 bytes in 1 hidden files.
57,344 bytes in 14 folders.
8,933,376 bytes in 50 files.
1,590,042,624 bytes available on disk.
4,096 bytes in each allocation unit.
390,391 total allocation units on disk.
388,194 allocation units available on disk.
H:\>
but when I tried connecting to the device using calibre and transferring a book it seemed to work fine. Perhaps running the chkdsk fixed it, perhaps letting it run out of juice fixed it but it seems to be working at the moment. To be fair this is the only issue I've had with the thing since I bought it years back so I'm not going to complain.
I'll report back if the problem reoccurs but thank you for helping.
Mike