Vista - External Hard Drive Won't Copy from Vista...

Hi,
I'm on Vista Home Premium 32-bit and I've had a Maxtor One Touch II
external drive that has worked fine under Vista for a while.

Now, oftentimes when I'm copying a file or folder to that drive and I click
to expand the "folder tree" of My Documents on my external drive, nothing
happens. It does not open up to show all my other folders within 'My
Documents'. Sometimes it does work - other times, not.

As I said, this drive has worked fine under Vista for quite a while, so I
don't know whether this is Vista related ot not. I do know that the drivers
installed fine on this external hard drive and that there are no new Vista
drivers to download for this drive on the Maxtor site.

Anyone have any ideas, short of unplugguing and re-plugging to get this
thing unstuck? I appreciate any thoughts.
Many Thanks, Frank

Hey, Frank.

Not sure if this is related, but twice now in the last two
weeks on one of my external drives, I had a partition that
showed up blank. The name of the volume and the drive
letter would be displayed, but when I went to click on it
there was nothing displayed. Even though, under "Computer"
it showed the partition as having "50 GB free of 200 GB",
clicking on the drive only showed a lot of empty white space,
this partition is where I have my vhds and virtual machines.
I didn't notice this until I went to use VPC 2007 and it didn't
give me a list of my vhds to start. Really freaked me out the
first time I saw this. I tried turning off/turning on the drive,
that didn't work. So, I unplugged it and plugged it back in,
that did work. The funny thing, this external has two partitions,
and the other partition showed its contents just fine.

This is the first time I have seen this, even since the beta days.
I have no answers, maybe it's just a fluke... it's been about almost
5 days since it last happened.

Wish I could be of more help.


-Michael

* Frank Bright:
> Hi,
> I'm on Vista Home Premium 32-bit and I've had a Maxtor One Touch II
> external drive that has worked fine under Vista for a while.
>
> Now, oftentimes when I'm copying a file or folder to that drive and I click
> to expand the "folder tree" of My Documents on my external drive, nothing
> happens. It does not open up to show all my other folders within 'My
> Documents'. Sometimes it does work - other times, not.
>
> As I said, this drive has worked fine under Vista for quite a while, so I
> don't know whether this is Vista related ot not. I do know that the drivers
> installed fine on this external hard drive and that there are no new Vista
> drivers to download for this drive on the Maxtor site.
>
> Anyone have any ideas, short of unplugguing and re-plugging to get this
> thing unstuck? I appreciate any thoughts.
> Many Thanks, Frank
>

Frank,

You may also want to do a chkdsk.

Open an elevated CMD prompt.

Type, chkdsk m: /x
Hit enter. Replace "m" with your usb drive letter.

For a bad sector scan, use chkdsk m: /x /r

The bad sector check may take a long time.


-Michael

* MICHAEL:
> Hey, Frank.
>
> Not sure if this is related, but twice now in the last two
> weeks on one of my external drives, I had a partition that
> showed up blank. The name of the volume and the drive
> letter would be displayed, but when I went to click on it
> there was nothing displayed. Even though, under "Computer"
> it showed the partition as having "50 GB free of 200 GB",
> clicking on the drive only showed a lot of empty white space,
> this partition is where I have my vhds and virtual machines.
> I didn't notice this until I went to use VPC 2007 and it didn't
> give me a list of my vhds to start. Really freaked me out the
> first time I saw this. I tried turning off/turning on the drive,
> that didn't work. So, I unplugged it and plugged it back in,
> that did work. The funny thing, this external has two partitions,
> and the other partition showed its contents just fine.
>
> This is the first time I have seen this, even since the beta days.
> I have no answers, maybe it's just a fluke... it's been about almost
> 5 days since it last happened.
>
> Wish I could be of more help.
>
>
> -Michael
>
> * Frank Bright:
>> Hi,
>> I'm on Vista Home Premium 32-bit and I've had a Maxtor One Touch II
>> external drive that has worked fine under Vista for a while.
>>
>> Now, oftentimes when I'm copying a file or folder to that drive and I click
>> to expand the "folder tree" of My Documents on my external drive, nothing
>> happens. It does not open up to show all my other folders within 'My
>> Documents'. Sometimes it does work - other times, not.
>>
>> As I said, this drive has worked fine under Vista for quite a while, so I
>> don't know whether this is Vista related ot not. I do know that the drivers
>> installed fine on this external hard drive and that there are no new Vista
>> drivers to download for this drive on the Maxtor site.
>>
>> Anyone have any ideas, short of unplugguing and re-plugging to get this
>> thing unstuck? I appreciate any thoughts.
>> Many Thanks, Frank
>>