Cannot Connect To My External HDD

[AndrewGS]

I got a new laptop (HP dv6700t running Vista Home Premium) that I need to hook my external HDD (500GB WD in generic case) to via USB. Windows Explorer freezes and the external HDD activity light constanly runs as soon as it's plugged in and it unfreezes as soon as it's unplugged.

I deleted "INFCACHE.1" from "C:\\Windows\INF" at the instruction of a blog and it worked for a few minutes, but it froze during the transfer of a few movies and hasn't worked since.

All help is appreciated.

[Paul Komski]

Is it the same with all three USB ports and does it happen in Safe Mode (F8 during startup)?

Have you tried deleting INFCACHE.1 again and had it worked for some time before transfering the quoted movies. Were those transfers to or from the USB drive and if to the drive is it formatted as FAT or as NTFS?

If you can "get in" using Safe Mode or by deleting INFCACHE.1 then maybe try chkdsk X: /F (where X: is replaced by the External's partition letter) from a command prompt.

[AndrewGS]

I've tried all three ports with the same results and in safe mode it cannot communicate with USB drives, or so it says.

I redeleted "INFCACHE.1" again but it didn't work this time. When it worked last time I immediately started copying the movies from the USB drive to the laptop, but it only worked for a few minutes.

When I disconnected the HDD a few minutes ago a popup told me that I needed to format the disk for it to work, but that ain't happening, especially if it can't communicate with the drive without freezing.

[Paul Komski]

If you can easily remove the HDD from the enclosure you might make more progress by slaving it directly into your system for now. You could also try BiNG (in my sig) to see if it can see (and repartition/format if you desire) the drive without going into windows at all.