External drive causing explorer to crash

[Macsorj]

So, one of my old Seagate barracuda 100GB hard drives was working fine just a few months ago, but recently I put the drive into an external IDE to USB 2.0 enclosure because I was looking for some files from it. I heard the platter start spinning and the read/write head start moving and went to 'This PC' to open it. My PC began to freeze and when I tried opening the drive explorer crashed completely. Any software that has information about my hard disks began acting strange and showed no information about any of them. Task manager showed that the drive causing the issue is at 100% usage but there was no data transfer at all.

 

I tried using different USB ports and 2 other computers but I ran into the same problem. I've been looking for a solution for days but nothing seems to work. Is there a way to fix this, or is my drive dead?

 

[Nord]

Sometimes antivirus systems will block external devices and hence can make your explorer crash and or make windows act strange. Disable it and try again. Especially if you use Bitdefender thats rather likely.

 

It could also that the external enclosure and/or the USB cable is broken and not the HDD itself.

[nuttytechy]

Hey dude, Im not sure if you have fixed your issue or you still got probs. There could be a few things to check.

1 It being an old IDE port, Make sure the jumper is on "master"
2 Im not a huge fan of IDE to usb and sometimes you can have issues.
3 Broken cable between hard drive and your PC. 
4 Try and dig out another hard drive as a process of elimination. If it works with another hard drive great, well sort of great, You know it isnt the usb to IDE nor any cables are broken, If it still causes issues then you know your hard drive is fine. If you are going to use the hard drive alot, Maybe several times a month etc then I would suggest getting a PCI controller card with IDE capabilities as I said earlier. USB to IDE, I find they tend to have issues. 

[samiscool51]

windows acts strange with old hardware, especially if it's using a old file system that windows doesn't support, e.g fat16

try using a older computer, one with winXP, it had to support many harddrives, filesystems, ect, during it's lifetime

[Macsorj]

2 hours ago, nuttytechy said:

4 Try and dig out another hard drive as a process of elimination. If it works with another hard drive great, well sort of great, You know it isnt the usb to IDE nor any cables are broken, If it still causes issues then you know your hard drive is fine. If you are going to use the hard drive alot, Maybe several times a month etc then I would suggest getting a PCI controller card with IDE capabilities as I said earlier. USB to IDE, I find they tend to have issues. 

Yeah, I plugged in another drive and it worked fine, so I guess the drive is dead. Thanks for the help.

[nuttytechy]

9 hours ago, Macsorj said:

Yeah, I plugged in another drive and it worked fine, so I guess the drive is dead. Thanks for the help.

Im glad you got down to the issue and no worries