I have a Sony VAIO 100GB External Hard drive that has recently been acting up.
I got it from eBay about 8 months ago. Yesterday I accidentally pulled the plug on it and I accidentally used windows vista (which currently has no anti-virus program).

Today when I turned on the computer it said 'Unable to write to disk, please make sure that the device is plugged in' I did the 'safely remove hardware' thing, but then the computer became really slow... So I waited and waited... for 6 minutes, then I waited long enough and pulled the plug.

I tried to restart the computer with the hard drive plugged in but just after the Windows XP loading screen the computer freezes, when I remove the External Hard drive Windows XP continues and I plug it in again, I log on but the moment the log on tune plays Windows freezes, I disconnect the external hard drive and windows resumes.

What's worse? Whenever windows loads and everything is ready, I plug in the external hard drive and everything becomes insanely slow, and most of the time it will not respond. I use task manager and see that disk usage is on around 5% and CPU usage is around 2% so I just don't get it... I try to close task manager but it won't respond either. The only option is to disconnect the hard drive and everything is normal again!

It might be a virus (because vista (without any AV programs) was used) but this has happened before but not nearly as severe. All I needed to do was restart the computer with the external hard drive plugged in and that's it.

This still happens in safe mode.

I can do nothing that will help. I can't just through the disk away because it has a lot of data that I need.

So please people on trap17, please help me!

It sould likes the hd is bust. I had that to my ipod, the hardrive was 100% broken. Sorry.

The computer sometimes freezes when usb devices are connected to the computer when on startup. I connected my ipod to my computer and it froze on the memory test on boot up.

hmm... looks like a good time to take it to payam hard drive repairs.
But are you sure its broken? I don't want to spend AU$100 on extracting the data on it only to find that there was a problem with the drivers.

It doesn't matter when I plug it in, it would make the computer insanely slow. And it would freeze windows indefinitely unless i unplug the device...

I might go see what I can do on Windows Vista before I take it to payam...

try formatting your hd, if this doesn't work then boot it in dos and copy your files and delete it. and also check if it is ntfs or such and convert it to a xp/vista compatible.

Plug it into a machine running Linux. Should work fine from there and you'll be able to recover your files.

-reply by James

`storage
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I don't know if you already went out to pay someone to do this for ya, but I would go by James's route and use a distro of Linux to access the drive. A Live CD should work fine and let you access the drive to take everything off of it and back it up to another external hard drive or to your local disk. After you're done backing everything up, you can format the hard drive, scan it, and do whatever you need to do to it to get it to work.

Another alternative is to try to access it from another computer, but if you think that it's infected with malware, then I wouldn't try that route.

The only time I've experienced something like this was with my eSATA ExpressCard and my two external SATA hard drives. Plugging one in would be fine, but as soon as I plugged the other SATA drive in, the entire OS would hang until I unplugged the ExpressCard. (If anyone knows why, please let me know.)

I would also go with attempting to access the disk via a Linux distro, and trying to copy the data... There are always good tools in Linux to get the damaged data from harddrives... It seems to me that Vista screwed something with the HD, probably screwed FAT table, or something like it...