Unable to access the disk in drive C:
Please make sure the drive is ready
and the disk is not write-protected.

No amount of trickery could get Quicken to recognise the hard drive. The hard drive was okay, and the software was working fine. Instead of banging my head against the keyboard, I tried to save directly to CD and what do you know – it worked. Here’s what I did:

Put the DVD/CDR in first.
Wait until the disk powers up.
When you are asked what you want to do, select BURN DISK
Go ahead and backup using Quicken’s Backup feature but remember to change the drive to your CD – usually d: or e:

Worked everytime.

To continue using the same CD for backups, pop the disk into the cd drive and wait until the drive reads the file. Once it has done this, proceed to your Quicken backup as you normally do.