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I have an external USB 1 TB hard drive which is formatted in NTFS. After copying of large amount of small files it stopped working. Meaning when I connect it to Windows XP or 7 the OS starts to lag trying to detect this HDD and after a couple of minutes it shows the disc as a RAW partition. The "reading" blue indicator is constantly blinking when connected to Windows PC.

If I connect this USB HDD to a Mac Os X notebook it works fine, I can see all the files and copy them out of the disk. I'm thinking to use Disk Utility to reformat this HDD to FAT32 under Mac Os X if there is no other option I can use to fix it to work under Windows.

How do I fix this hard drive to work under Windows?


ADDED: This happens on 3 Windows computers I have near me, one XP and two 7. I used Ubuntu LiveCD and loaded TestDisk to fix partition. Testdisk seems to fixed something in partition table, but this didn't help, Windows still hangs and doesn't see files. Although Testdisk showed me files and folders on my disk without any problems. But I couldn't see this HDD in Midnight Comander under Ubuntu. I looked at /media.

2 Answers 2

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first thought : Disable auto play and Indexing service (temporarily) to just to make sure they are out of the issue

Now without connecting the USB Drive open admin command prompt,

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

devmgmt.msc

In the Device Manager Console, from the View menu, select Show Hidden Devices

Now remove (uninstall) the non-present disk-driver for the usb disk (from Disk Drive Menu) along with the mass-storage usb driver for the said drive (USB controller Menu) Reboot and reconnect the drive

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  • Didn't help. When I connect this HDD it constantly blinks again, Windows tries to install the driver and hangs. After about 3 minutes of hanging it successfully installs the driver, but disk is still blinking and trying to open MyComputer..
    – Dmitriy
    Nov 27, 2013 at 16:40
  • ..makes Windows hang for another 5 minutes.
    – Dmitriy
    Nov 27, 2013 at 16:40
  • I have added more details to the question.
    – Dmitriy
    Nov 27, 2013 at 16:48
  • what about smart status ? you could use crystaldiskinfo
    – dccet
    Nov 27, 2013 at 21:18
  • Disk Utility shows that SMART is not available for this HDD. crystaldiskinfo is a windows app and will most likely hang with windows
    – Dmitriy
    Nov 28, 2013 at 7:07
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Reformatting this HDD to FAT32 under Mac Os X using Disk Utility fixed it to work under Windows.

May be this HDD is not meant to be working under NTFS. That's strange. It was initially under FAT32, I converted it to NTFS about a month ago. Will see how it works...

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