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Hi me4321, I had a lot of problems with an external drive recently. The thing is, apparently they tend to make bad sectors on the drive aswell as not mounting properly and creating I/O device errors and windows delayed write errors, which means you can't really fix them. The drive I had was a maxtor inside a lacie enclosure, you sure it isn't a lacie enclosure?
Anyway, you say whenever you try to "open" it from your pc it freezes? You mean when you try to click on the drive and view its contents? When you click on my computer does it take a long time to find the drives (with the little torch animation)?Was the drive working noramlly for a while on the same pc? You say you have backed up your data to it? You might be able to get the data back off it anyway if it's important to you, if you need to do this post back requesting info on that and I'll tell you things I did (but first you need to be able to access the disk), I'm no expert but I managed to get most of my data back.
When you try to copy files to the drive, do you ever get "windows delayed write error" balloon popping up from the system tray? Perhaps you can't access the drive at all to even try to copy files so you wouldn't have got this yet? Anyway, if you can access the properties of the drive, try turning write caching off. To do this, go to my computer, right click on the drive go to properties, then the hardware tab and highlight the relevant drive from the list of drives on your computer, then go to properties (or double click the drive) and go to the policies tab, deselect "enable write caching". Also, if this is already disabled, try turning it on, it works for some people apparently. Also try to turn off the indexing service for that drive, right click on the drive in my computer, properties, and it's at the bottom of the general tab, deselect "allow indexing...", this also helps some people mount problematic external drives more stably so they can retrieve their data.
Try contacting the manufacturer of the drive or where you bought it, but if they have no fixes available like drive firmwares and they ask you to send the drive in for a service, this basically means it won't work, ever. Just get your money back. Beware of external usb hard drives, sometimes they just don't work, especially lacie with maxtor inside.
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