Hello,

I've been having a problem with my Lacie 1TB external HDD for some time now. I'll just precise that it's a USB 2.0 disk and has an on/off switch. I apologize if the post is long but I'm gonna put in everything I can think of.



The disk worked fine for a few months then at one point it started hard clicking and soon after I was unable to transfer any data in or out of the disk without causing the transfer to hang after about 20s. I sent it back to Lacie for repair and, long story short, after they "lost" my disk, they sent me a brand new one, but apparently the repair centre wasn't informed so I received my old disk too, repaired. So I now have 2 similar HDDs.

My problem is

- at first, when I tried to run the format tool preloaded on the disk, to format the disk before use, it hanged and the progress bar didn't move. The only way to close the window was to shut down the disk. That happened on both disks, and they were then listed as RAW in disk manager.

- I tried to format or delete the volume using window's built in tool, but when I select my format options and click ok, it just gets back to the disk manager with the hourglass mouse pointer, as if it's doing something although there is no progress bar or anything. It just stays there for hours although it should be super fast as the disk is empty. I tried different softwares like partition magic but they just hang on "detecting devices" as soon as I turn the disk on. Same thing for disk manager if I open it after having turned on the disk, it just hangs on "connecting to virtual service". Again, same with both disks.

- I then tried to format the disks using my dad's xp laptop and the software Partition Wizard, and it formated both disks into NTFS in seconds. That leads me to believe that the fault comes from my laptop. I partitioned one of the disks with 200GB of FAT32 and the rest in NTFS to see if it would change anything on my laptop.

- For both disks and both NTFS and FAT32, when I try accessing them from "Computer", I sometimes can get in the disk folder but when I try to copy a file in it the tranfer bar just stalls on "transferring file" without even starting the transfer. If I try clicking somewhere, the transfer windows blanks out and freezes, followed by the "Computer" window then windows explorer itself. If I turn off the disk then everything returns back to normal. Sometimes, just trying to access the disk folder freezes everything, and that can affect wmp or any other program open, they just freeze until the disk is turned off. This happens every time.

Not finished....

- At one point it kinda started working if I had the little software Lacie USB Boost activated, which is supposed to boost your transfer speed. Here's a copy of what I sent Lacie, I spent 4 months with the support team and I'm not closer to resolving that. They replied to this post by saying that there is no known issue with the usb boost.

"1) If the USB Boost is activated, I can now transfer files to the disk, however I get the exact same error message (0xd1) as the one I described in my very first post if I try to transfer large files to the disk (although it did that for a 40Mb file). This problem is the same as the one experienced by this person BSOD when transfering Large files to external HD
He has the same disk as me and it was suggested that he uninstalled the USB boost or changed the extension of the FNETURPX.sys to make it unusable. I did that which brings me to the 2nd problem.
2) If I do disable the USB Boost, I revert back to the message saying that the file is no longer in its folder and I can't create a new folder on the disk either. I have tried to reenable the usb boost, and transferring works again, but for large files I get the stop error message again."


I have now uninstalled the usb boost as it shoudln't be required for the disk to work. The BSOD I'm referring to in the post is a 0xD1 DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and I sometimes got also a 0x1A MEMORY_MANAGEMENT when I tried to transfer large files on the disk. As I canlt transfer anything now it's not the main priority but I got these errors even at the very beginning after I bought the disk, so there may be a problem here too.
The problem I'm adressing in 2) is that transferring anything on the disk would result in a message saying that the file is not in the folder I'm copying it from, although it is. I'd even get the same message if I only tried to right click in the disk folder and create a new folder.


However the problem I'm experiencing right now is what I've written in bold earlier, so as not to get sidetracked .


I have updated all my drivers using a software called Drivermax, run an sfc, run Malwarebyte's, run a virus check, run a system health report (attached with the BSOD app report, as instructed). My system specs are written below the post. Flash drives and my archos 7 work fine with my laptop.



So to summarize: the problem I'm experiencing now is in bold in the post, I received BSODs even when the disk worked fine, the problem comes from my computer as both disks work on other computers, and all my disk management tools seem not to be working properly.



I'd really appreciate it if you could help me, I'm running on 10GB of free space left on my laptop with those 2TB nagging me..

Hey kesume watsup? Yeah the BSOD report is attached to my 1st post. I reverted back to the english OS to make it cuz everything was in french and I doubt it would have been useful. I hope everything has been translated. I'll wait for the expert no worries.

Hi Jonathan,
I forgot to mention that I had already done that previously, as suggested by the Lacie support team. When it didn't work I then proceded to install newer versions of my usb drivers using drivermax. I have however redone the operation and uninstalled all my usb drivers, but it didn't change anything after restart. The newer versions of the drivers, that I got from drivermax, were automatically reinstalled by windows. My usb flash drives and my archos 7, which is recognized as an internal hard drive, work fine on all 3 usb ports.

However it's funny because the disk behaves a bit differently now.
- I have attached my disk management window (attachment 1)
- Both the NTFS and FAT partitions ask for my administrator password if I want to rename them or transfer a file (attachment 2) and then hangs on the transfer window (attachment 3) until I turn the disk off. If I try cancelling it just hangs on the cancel window and sometimes freezes the "Computer" folder and explorer.
- In the beginning it randomly worked which allowed me to rename the 2 partitions to Lacie NTFS and Lacie FAT, and transfer one picture on each. But now if I want to delete them from the disk it just hangs on the deletion window (attachment 4).

Hope that helps.

Hi John,

Thanks for the suggestion. The disk and both partitions work great with Ubuntu, I transferred a 5GB file on the NTFS and 500MB on the FAT and had no problem. I would usually have got a BSOD with windows if I had tried to transfer a large file like that and it had let me.

Now I'm back on windows and I have the same problems again.

NOTE: I don't have the vista installation disk, vista came pre-installed on the laptop without a CD. I burnt an iso image of a recovery disk a while ago and it saved me from a tight spot but I wouldn't be able to reinstall vista with this cd, just use the repair tools. (just in case you ask me to reinstall )

I'll try that but do you have an idea of which services are more likely to be responsible? Cuz I've got more than 100 services, and you can add to that about 50+ startup services too so disabling each one and restarting will potentially take me loads of time. I guess I can already eliminate the services that are stopped right now, but that's not a lot. (see attachments)