hd causes laptop to hang briefly every 1-2 minutes

Hello

I have a dell latitude e4300 laptop (NTFS formatted), windows vista, since I started using WD MyBook 500gb (FAT32 Formatted) via ESata connection (built in in the laptops connectors) my computer started hanging for brief 1-2 second periods every 1-2 minutes when the esata drive is not connected.

I have tried to trace this problem to a specific application that may be trying to access the drive when its not connected but had no luck so far using the resource monitor, also i have rolled out heating issues that might be laptop fan related, these hangs only occur whenever that ESata drive is disconnected. i am using the drive as backup.

I have also installed avast pro and spy bot search and destroy for threat analysis and have come up with no results.

my best guess is that some application or service maybe indexing is trying to access the external esata drive even when its not connected, oh and shutting down the computer and turning it back on doesn't help.

how do i trace the source of the problem and find find out / fix what's causing it?

Welcome to the forum

Can be many causes for the problem and therefore many solutions. I think that this idea, however, may work.

When you have the problem type event viewer, in search. Then look for errors.

If you do not come up with anything try this

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7

Then we both hope.

Thanks for the reply, however this did not solve the problem,
I have also tried to reinstall and update all computer drivers and this actually got the problem to get worse, now the sound skips regardless of weather the external hdd is connected!

Defrag your hard drive:

- Click start
- In the start search bar type: cmd

- Once the icon appears right click it and choose run as administrator
- Accept the UAC prompt

- copy and paste this into the command prompt then hit enter:

defrag %systemdrive% -v -w

- then let it do its thing, it might take awhile though depending on how messy it is. Hope this helps the issue.