Windows XP external 1 terabyte hard drive to an internal 500GB hard drive failure

Question

When copying a folder that is around 300GB in size from an external 1 terabyte to a internal 500GB slave hard drive in Windows XP the copy will start, but as soon as it begins it freezes and it must be forced shut down. Both hard drives work fine alone but when moving from one to another this happens. The external is connected via USB while the internal is set up via EIDE.

Any ideas would be great.

Answer 1

I would check that the External Hard Drive has enough power and is not only drawing power from the usb bus. Also try connecting the External Hard Drive to another USB Port.If not try using the program Fast Copy from http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en to copy large files as it has a configurable buffer and works a lot better than the native file copy process in windows.

Answer 2

If you can read and write fine, or copy smaller files to and from the external drive, The only possible reason that I can think of as to why this isn't working is that you are simply not giving it enough time.

300GBs is a very large size to copy, and typically, the larger size (and more files) you try to copy, the longer it will take to prepare the copy (before ANY files are even copied).

I would try to leave it on overnight to verify this.

If there is a problem, an alternate program I would use is Teracopy.

Answer 3

I would try creating a batch file using robocopy (although as it's on xp you'll have to use xcopy). Using a number of switches you'll be able to view the files as they are copied across and verify them after.

Also as Wil said, try this overnight.