Vista - External Hardrive Crashed

I had a perfectly functioning external hard drive until I tried to
back up some fileson my main drive by copying them over to it. The
copy function stalled when it was calculating the size of of the
transfer (at least that is what it said it was doing) so I finally
clicked on cancel.

Now, I can't copy anything to the hard drive. I also can't use Windows
backup - it can't read the hard drive. The drive shows up in Windows
Explorer, sometimes, sometimes not.

When I try to copy files, it says it can't find the files that it
wants to copy. That is wrong, because the files are there and can be
copied to another folder on the C: drive. They just won't go to the H:
drive.

I was able to do a quick format of the external drive, but that didn't
help.

I don't have another external drive to use to test but there are no
other drives that have the same problem.

I'm using Vista Home Premim, installed over top of XP Home on a Dell
Dimension 8300 that has loads of room on the main drive (68%) and
loads of memory (1 gb).

Try this. Delete the partition on the external hard drive. Then create a new
partition and format the partition. Reboot and see if the operating system
ID's the external hard drive.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

<anon_278@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8j8p3350gfan0d8ves4gk1g7rhsft55mi8@4ax.com...
>I had a perfectly functioning external hard drive until I tried to
> back up some fileson my main drive by copying them over to it. The
> copy function stalled when it was calculating the size of of the
> transfer (at least that is what it said it was doing) so I finally
> clicked on cancel.
>
> Now, I can't copy anything to the hard drive. I also can't use Windows
> backup - it can't read the hard drive. The drive shows up in Windows
> Explorer, sometimes, sometimes not.
>
> When I try to copy files, it says it can't find the files that it
> wants to copy. That is wrong, because the files are there and can be
> copied to another folder on the C: drive. They just won't go to the H:
> drive.
>
> I was able to do a quick format of the external drive, but that didn't
> help.
>
> I don't have another external drive to use to test but there are no
> other drives that have the same problem.
>
> I'm using Vista Home Premim, installed over top of XP Home on a Dell
> Dimension 8300 that has loads of room on the main drive (68%) and
> loads of memory (1 gb).
>

<anon_278@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:8j8p3350gfan0d8ves4gk1g7rhsft55mi8@4ax.com...
> I'm using Vista Home Premim, installed over top of XP Home on a Dell
> Dimension 8300 that has ... loads of memory (1 gb).

This won't answer your question, but just to pass this on, 1Gb of memory is
MINIMUM recommended for Vista Premium and up, so what you have doesn't count
as "loads"; 2Gb would fit that bill...

How do I delte teh partition?

On Sat, 5 May 2007 14:03:45 -0400, "Richard Urban"
<richardurbanREMOVETHIS@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Try this. Delete the partition on the external hard drive. Then create a new
>partition and format the partition. Reboot and see if the operating system
>ID's the external hard drive.