Totally Perplexed with u.s.b. HD. HELP!

Hey Gurus, I wonder if you can help me out with this problem, I have 2 500gig hard drives, one with 500 movies on it, the other with a collection of Software,Games,E-Books e.t.c. totalling about 300 gig, needless to say they are to me Priceless,
lent the movie one to a friend and got it back but am unable to open it,so i switched to the other HD in case it was a driver problem,now i cannot acces that one either!

Here is the info in the "windows device timeout"
"The specified I/O operation on\Device\Harddisk5\DR16 was not completed before the time-out period expired" with the options to cancel,try again,continue

No matter which one i choose i come back to this message, i think they may have come in contact with a machine with the autorun virus. I installed Autorun remover and it found it on a usb 160 gig HD which i had connected earlier to check my theory ( thought that if autorun had infected my comp,it would attach itself) and it did but was erased.
When i run Auto remover on system start-up and turn on the HD, Windows freezes and then autorun doesn`t respond.
My thinking would be that the HD`s are too big to be opened on autorun, but i seem to be clueless as what to do next, any of you Guru`s able to shed some light on this?

Sorry if this is longwinded but am trying to give as much info as i can.

Couple of answers from elsewhere.


I would suggest plugging the hard drive into a different computer to see if it works and, if so, removing the data from the drive and placing it on another hard drive.

As for the best way to store large amounts of data safely, this is a tricky situation. Hard drives are usually fine for this, but there is always the chance that the hard drive could die or that the electronics working the external connection could malfunction. Unfortunately, this is still the most affordable way to go.

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First thing to do is download the manufacturers utilities for the drive and see what they show. If you look in device manager under disk drives you should be able to identify the actual drive used inside the enclosure. It owuld be preferred to remove the drive from the external enclosure and connect it directly to your PC, trouble shooting is much more precise when you get the USB interface and translation out of the way.
Removing the drive depends on the enclosure, usually a couple of screws hold it together, on others you need to gently pry it apart to lossen tabs. Sometimes the screws are hidden behind the rubber feet on teh device. Installing it to the PC will depend on whether it is a SATA or IDE, though the basics are the same. Just depends if you have to set jumpers or not.
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Am I right in saying you hear the windows sound when you plug them in and if you double click on safely remove hardware in your taskbar it shows as a a device plugged in but not in windows explorer etc. as a drive??

Tried all those suggestions and none worked noely,Been banging away at this for on and off a week now, have switched enclosures,numerous computers and software downloads all to no avail.

Bang on Mooley! almost word for word mate, except when i double click on the icon to remove, it just slows down,then if i switch the Hd off at power, for a split second Disk I will show up.

Okay. First of all go to run then cmd then type chkdsk I: /r and it should restart to do it, while the device is connected of course, but sure you know that yourself mate. See if that does anything and also have you tried either on different usb ports at the back of pc?

I assumed there it usually shows up as I: as thats what you mentioned mate??

done that mooley, and half way through it i get the error sound and this report
The exception Integer division by zero
(0xc0000094) occurred in the application at location 0x5b35eb6b
click on ok to terminate the program
click on cancel to debug the program

Then in command box comes the file on this system is FAT32

Edit: Run it again. Type the same again and let it run again and let me know what happens.

Have you tried either external HD on different USB ports? At the back of pc preferably. Assuming it's a pc?? Have you tried using a different USB cable for the device? Have you tried installing USB 2.0 drivers for the make and model of your device that you get from manufacturers website?

The same happened my two externals a while ago and I sorted it I'm just trying to go back over what I did exactly. Do all these first. Surprisingly the cable change worked on one of them!

am running it now mate, and believe it or not i have tried everything you suggested, three different comps bought new cables, switche usb enclosures e.t.c.

I have ordered one of these to day, hopefully this might help solve it


eBay.ie: SATA IDE to USB Converter Universal Drive Adapter Cable (item 400062071404 end time 14-Oct-09 10:20:08 BST)

Way too much stuff on these babies to ever give up!

You shouldn't need that mate. I sorted this with mine a while ago. I's still trying to backtrack on what I did.

no worries mate, anyway i thought that thing on E-bay would be pretty handy to have lying around while fixing comps and laptops, and not a bad price too