Oh no! More boring computer problems! Oh no!

What do you do if your external hard drive is suddenly not being recognized by your computer? Most everything on there I've got elsewhere, except for one thing: 20+ GB of Beatles covers that took me years to compile. If you have to do data retrieval, how expensive is that?

Have you tried hooking it up to a different computer than your own? If a different computer picks it up it could be a problem with the usb port.

Thanks--I'll see if the one downstairs will recognize it.

Mac or PC?

Same problem downstairs. The computer's a PC; the external hard drive is TrekStor.

okay, do you have storage to be able to transfer to 20 GB? Probably one drive is better

when you plug it in does it start to do something then click and stop?

or is it just not responsive?

if it's the latter you might wanna buy a new enclosure for the drive and that could fix the problem

Could the connecting cord be borked? Ours is. We wiggled it until it recognized the drive and quickly transferred everything, being sure not to move the cord at all.

Basically the light keeps flashing, and you can hear a clicking sound, like it's trying to get itself going but can't. My brother-in-law actually refrigerated it overnight, something that's worked for him in the past, but nothing. 4,000 Beatles covers gone.

Some actual good news on the malfunctioning-technology front: I took the drive into Best Buy, and they were able to transfer everything over to a new external HD. $170--$100 for the work, plus the cost of the drive. (They waived the diagnostic fee.) So I can go back to pointlessly collecting Beatles covers I'll never listen to. What I've taken away from this is to make sure I have back-up to the back-up, so I'm going to also load the irreplaceable stuff onto the computer downstairs.

Installing Windows Vista, and it's running CHKDSK twice in a row??? Seems to be going faster the 2d time, maybe?

The OS is installed and computer works, but now it doesn't recognize my wireless USB adapter so I STILL can't get online normally. ;_;

HOW MANY TIMES IS IT GOING TO RUN CHKDSK. GOD.

u probably need an updated driver?

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Update-a-driver-for-hardware-that-isnt-working-properly

http://www.devicedoctor.com

Maybe I didn't do all the set-up steps. Trying again.

It worked! It's working! I don't have the password handy for our network so I can't connect yet but I will soon!!

o shit wait until your extended family learns what a computer genius you are

Fuck I hate computers.

HELLOOOOOOOO

LOL mookie otm :)

My family, like everyone else in the world that I know, now only uses macs. Their issues with viruses and spyware have gone from "insurmountable" to "zero" since they switched.

It's insane that virus protection even needs to be a thing anymore. Microsoft should have used the NT/XP leap to redesign the whole thing to work like a proper OS, but no. I presume MS was getting kickbacks from Symantec etc.

how long does the average disk defragging take? I'm running it on my laptop, okay for the first time so that might make a difference, but it's been running now for 4 hours...

how long has it been and how full is yr disk?

well defrag is a rather lenghty process, maybe some sectors of your disk have been corrupted and that slows down things

yeah should have told you that.

it's only a 140 gb hard drive. it's about 74gb full.

so far it's been 3 hours.

A rather fragmented disk (say 10%-12%) that is 3/4 full or more could take 4 hours or more. Does the defragger say what "pass" it is on currently? Expect at least 8 passes.

that seems like kind of a long time, but not a big deal -- just let it run overnight

Defragmenting a hard drive takes a long time - overnight is normal. You can usually do other minor stuff like web surfing during defrag though.

well the odd thing is there is no progress bar or information, it just shows "Defragmenting hard disk..." and a spinning icon.

okay, it I'll leave it on. yeah managing to use web at the same time.

thanks all

I turn my laptop on only find it not acknowledging any keys I type. I plug in the spare keyboard we have and it won't acknowledge that either. wtf do i do?

oh wait it acknowledges capslock and backspace. i haven't spilt anything on it, messed with any settings or anything. GAH.

Is it an HP? I googled and found:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01703941&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&softwareitem=ob-68739-1&os=2100&ts=true&rule=4030&product=3851338
(Basically just turn off the computer, unplug the AC adapter it, take out the battery, hold the power button to the right for 30 seconds, put the battery back in, plug the AC adapter back in, turn it on).

This will make the keyboard type again. To prevent it from happening again, you have to download a driver from hp's drivers and downloads website and download the driver "WinFlash for HP Notebook System BIOS (for Notebooks with AMD Processors) - Microsoft Windows Vista-Based". http://www.hp.com/#Support

it is an acer. will try the non-hp-specific bits though. :)

I've never had the problem.. but I hope that helps!

a search with the acer keyword added has some more complicated directions.. I'd definitely try the above method first:
http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-34616-acer-aspir-5100-keybrd-and-mouse-problem

hp advice didn't work.

gonna go with a solid 'left it and hope it feel better later' system, although this doesn't make sense. also a 'i don't feel comfortable removing my hd like that acer site says, so if it doesn't miraciously start working by tomorrow, i'll take it to pc world'

haha, fair enough.

lol i think 'leave it a while and hope it cures itself' may have worked.

I wonder if any of you can help me with this problem? I have a PC with Windows 7 and an external hard drive. A while ago I was trying to move a bunch of mp3's from the computer's hard drive to the external hard drive. Some kind of error happened in the process, and not all of the mp3's were copied to the external hard drive correctly. Now, whenever I try to open the external hard drive, my computer says that some of the files on the external HD are corrupted, and would I want Windows to try and fix the files and the corrupted "sectors"? I tried this fix option, but it took several hours for Windows to do that, and after the process was over it said I should format the external HD in order to completely fix the problem.

Now, I have about 300 gigabytes worth of stuff on the external HD, so I'd have to move all of that somewhere else if I want to format the HD. On top of that, if I open the external HD (the only way of doing that is telling Windows I want to open it without trying to fix the problem, otherwise it won't let me in), I can still move the files around, but it takes a lot longer than normally. I moved the folder that held the mp3's which (I think) caused this problem from the external HD to the trash bin, but it took something like 8 hours before they all were moved there. Now they're sitting in the trash bin, but when I try to empty it, the computer says it will take 8 more hours to completely delete them. So moving the 300 gigabytes of stuff from the external HD to the computer HD could possibly take days!

Do you think there's any way to solve this problem without having to move all the stuff away from the external HD and/or having to format it?

Maybe not the answer you want, but you can either leave it copying them over for a few hours/days, or use this as an opportunity to weed out stuff you don't want and only copy over what you want to keep.

Yeah, the latter option is what I've been thinking of... But I'd still want to know if I can somehow do it bit faster, as I don't keeping the computer running constantly for hours and hours doesn't really fit in my daily schedule. I don't understand how a few files being corrupted can cause the whole external HD to become 1000 times slower than normally?

Because it knows there's 'corruption' around, and it tries to "tread carefully"...

On my Windows 7 pc, since an hour or so I cannot pull up any websites in Firefox, my preferred browser, apart from ILX and my webmail. I restarted my pc, didn't do anything special, but nothing (from Google to eBay, from bbc to tumblr) will show, Firefox showing me that "check your network" error. Apart from ILX and webmail!

Anyone got any idea as to why this is?

here's a google result from a similar query, since you can't google? No experience over here - but I am a lifelong, crazy, Opera browser girl.

I had the same problem with a website i was visiting and finally found what seems like a fix. heres how i did it.

1) go to tools and click options

2) click on the advanced button and then click the network tab

3) then under connections click settings

4) click auto-detect proxy settings for this network.

hope this works for you as it worked for me.

Thanks Lex, but no dice. I also checked if windows firewall was off as it's supposed to be, and it still is.

It's bizarre to me that ILX works but nothing else does, not even Google...

I'm just shooting in the dark but here's another post I found, maybe? It is a very bizarre problem!

The problem is not Windows 7 , the problem is within Firefox 7, and it is because of the network.http.max-connections that were set to 256 , and that is way to much. You need to change it to 48, follow this steps
In the address bar, type about:config
If it shows up, click on I’ll be careful
Filter for network.http.max-connections
Click on network.http.max-connections
Change this from 256 to 48
Restart Firefox

Thanks again for all the help and effort FFM. Shortly after, last night, I lost connection completely. Went through firewall settings, safe mode, back to an earlier restore point etc, all to no avail, but it turned out my DNS settings had changed. I'm completely in the dark about how that happened, but that was the problem. Still can't grasp why ILX did work and the rest didn't, or why Firefox didn't work but Maxthon did. I hate these (Windows) problems that just arise out of nowhere, but am counting my blessings at the moment. Thanks again for helping out!

I'm happy to have tried! How very bizarre...I guess they knew it would be cruel to take away ILX as well as everything else ;)

Like you expect Windows to do things that make sense?

Too right ;)

xp