USB External HD Hangs PC. Help appreciated.

NotWormBoy

Apologies if this is supposed to go elsewhere, if the mods know where, lash it there sure.

Have an odd issue with my PC at the moment, concerning my external HD. It happens with both of my externals, as well as a 60GB media player.

Whenever I attach any of these devices via USB (either front or back) to my PC when it is already booted, I get the little double-beep that indicates something has been connected, and then the machine hangs. I can click on any applications that are maximised to the fore, and use them (a bit slowly, admittedly) but if I minimise them, they can't be brought back up. Also, double clicking shortcuts on the desktop won't launch the associated applications. Task manager also won't load upon Ctrl-Alt-Del, and if its already open, most programs seem to be unresponsive (ie their memory usage doesn't change) from the process manager.

If I boot the machine with the drive already attached, it won't boot. Gets past the BIOS, but then sits on a black screen for as long as you want. Doesn't get into Windows.

First I thought that it was just something with my USB ports, but I have a mouse and a PS2 pad attached through USB and they both work fine. As do smaller pendrives, such as 1/2GB size. I've upgraded the drivers for my USB ports through device manager, etc...

Then I noticed similary behaviour when I tried to mount a Truecrypt container as a local drive. Exactly the same thing happened. Which might indicate a problem with my computer disk management or something (I'm guess here, since I'm out of my depth).

Does anyone have any ideas as to how to resolve this? Is my USB hub just bollixed?

Oh, one last thing - the hard drives work fine on another machine, or on laptops. Once, when I took them to a laptop, ran chkdsk and other utilities on them to check for errors, then reconnected to the main machine with the problems... the drive worked fine. Until I disconnected it and reconnected it, whereupon another hang made its unwelcome entrance. Its bugging me and I'm not savvy enough to solve this myself.

Antar Bolaeisk

1: What Operating System are you using?
2: Are you up to date with all the latest service packs? eg XP is now on service pack 3
3: (possible silly question) are you perhaps trying to connect a USB 2.0 device to a USB 1.0 port?

NotWormBoy

Antar Bolaeisk wrote: »

1: What Operating System are you using?
2: Are you up to date with all the latest service packs? eg XP is now on service pack 3
3: (possible silly question) are you perhaps trying to connect a USB 2.0 device to a USB 1.0 port?

1. Windows XP - SP3.
2. Yup.
3. To the best of my knowledge they're all USB 2.0 ports.

Its just weird the way some drives work in it, but others don't, and those drives also work fine in other laptops.

NotWormBoy

No one got any more ideas? Would really appreciate advice on this one...

witnessmenow

As a temporary fix you get a extra USB card for less than €10.

NotWormBoy

Bit of an update on this, its still not working :-) But I may have found out why.

But I went into my disk management section of the admin tools. Found this:



Now, my PC hard drive should be 232 or so GB. Its no, obviously, as for some reason there's 5.0.5 GB gone out of it into this partition here. Trouble is, I have no idea how that partition was created, or why it is there. It doesn't have a drive letter, nor can I assign one to it for some reason. Whenever I right click on it, all I get is "Help" as an option instead of the options I get when I right click on the c: drive for example.



I can't even view the properties of it on the above screen.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I wonder if I went into gparted or something similar to check it out at boot level. Ah, I'll do that and see, but if anyone has any suggestions I'd really appreciate them.

Gone Drinking

Have you got one of those broadband dongles installed by any chance?

Have you tried plugging a drive in, in safe mode?

NotWormBoy

Gone Drinking wrote: »

Have you got one of those broadband dongles installed by any chance?

Nope, have a wireless card, but its not enabled at the moment. No dongles.

Have you tried plugging a drive in, in safe mode?

Nope, not yet. Good call though, will give it a go.

You can force it into safe mode from boot right?

Gone Drinking

Keep Hitting F8 when its booting up and you'll get the option to boot into safe mode.

Overheal

Its a zombie drive nuke the machine from orbit reformat yeaaagagagghahghhgh/1!!!!!

Seriously though if youre ripping your hair out, backing up and reformatting might be easier.

NotWormBoy

Overheal wrote: »

Its a zombie drive nuke the machine from orbit reformat yeaaagagagghahghhgh/1!!!!!

Seriously though if youre ripping your hair out, backing up and reformatting might be easier.

Its the only way to be sure.

I'll keep it in reserve as a last option. I'm more of a Burke than a Ripley, I suppose.

ronkmonster

Turn of automatic restarts so when it hangs (assuming you mean it restarts), it will stay at blue screen instead.

Look for a driver file listed. usually ending with .sys

NotWormBoy

ronkmonster wrote: »

Turn of automatic restarts so when it hangs (assuming you mean it restarts), it will stay at blue screen instead.

Look for a driver file listed. usually ending with .sys

Nope, no blue screen unfortunately (who'd have thunk it). It just stops accepting input on a limited basis. Programs that are open run for a while ok, but if you minimise them for example, you can't get them back up again. You can double click icons to launch new applications, but they won't load. Unless you have task manager open already, you can't launch that either.

ronkmonster

Have you checked the event log?

If you have a windows disc, try run sfc /scannow
It'll check all your windows files

NotWormBoy

ronkmonster wrote: »

Have you checked the event log?

If you have a windows disc, try run sfc /scannow
It'll check all your windows files

Thanks, I'll put that on the list of things to check.

ronkmonster

Sorry I can give any more specific ideas.

I would usually just do a clean install when something like that happens.
Some things are just too much effort compared to clean install.

NotWormBoy

Well would you look at that.

I plugged it in today when I got home, more in hope than anything, and ... it works. I unplugged it and attached it again... and it still worked. I haven't rebooted yet, so we'll see what happens yet. I didn't do a thing, but ... for some reason, it works.

Computers, huh?

Overheal

It knows you've been talking to us.



Sleep with a magnet under your pillow.

NotWormBoy

Turns out it wasn't working after all. Just temporarily. I rebooted the machine and it stopped working again.

Did some tests though:

1. Works fine in Safe mode.
2. Works fine booting from a Ubuntu live CD for example.

Now I'm thinking it is a driver problem. Haven't been able to find my Windows CD, so I can't run the repair scannow stuff.