Cannot access 1TB External Hard drive (USB) Crashing windows explorer

carwiz said:

Partition - Mark as Inactive

Make sure your C: drive is marked Active before you reboot. It's the one that has "Boot" under Status. You should be able to do that from Disk Manager.

Here's a snip of my drives for comparison. And yeah, the scan could cause the missing NTFS. It could be trying to determine the type.

I've marked the C: As active, but my SR is still marked at "System" as yours is not.
How would i go about making it not system, or would this be fixed along with the restart?
Screenshot of Disc manager now

Hmmmmmmm. I didn't notice that before. That's usually set at OS load. I wonder if that has something to do with the way HP loads their system. Are you running a retail version of Windows 7 or was it loaded when you bought the system?

I'm having second thoughts now. Perhaps more help is needed before going any further. I'll post a help request and see what comes up.

carwiz said:

Hmmmmmmm. I didn't notice that before. That's usually set at OS load. I wonder if that has something to do with the way HP loads their system. Are you running a retail version of Windows 7 or was it loaded when you bought the system?

I'm having second thoughts now. Perhaps more help is needed before going any further. I'll post a help request and see what comes up.

Well i have yet to restart, and i haven't messed with anything since first boot, So if anything's changed probably some sort of virus, or s side effect from some program, either way i can defiantly say i haven't changed anything there.

I posted a help request so we'll have to wait on that.

Getting back to the original problem. I re-read your posts and you mention you "heard the drive spin up".
Does the drive show up in Device Manager? If so, check the drive properties and see if you have Write Caching enabled. Having this set and not "ejecting" the drive before turning it off can cause corrupt drive problems.

System Reserved partition should remain set Active since it hosts the System Boot files which boot Win7, as signified by the System flag on it. It takes more to move them to C than just moving the Active flag, and there's no good reason to do that anyway.

In Carwiz' screenshot his System Active partition has been decommissioned as it has no System Active flags. This may have been the result of a repair gone awry. It's okay the way it is now.

As to the external HD back up the data from it and run a Disk Check on it with both boxes checked as shown in tutorial.

If there are further problems I would either plug it in internally to a laptop to run the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test extended CD scan on it, or from USB run Partition Wizard Partition surface test.

If it tests good then wipe the HD with Diskpart Clean Command since code in the boot sector could explain how it is messing with Win7, then repartition it in Disk Mgmt: Partition or Volume - Create New

carwiz said:

I posted a help request so we'll have to wait on that.

Getting back to the original problem. I re-read your posts and you mention you "heard the drive spin up".
Does the drive show up in Device Manager? If so, check the drive properties and see if you have Write Caching enabled. Having this set and not "ejecting" the drive before turning it off can cause corrupt drive problems.

Okay just to make sure you're up-to-date on what's happened.

I connected the drive to my USB before creating the thread, the drive has a blue processing light on it (Flickers when it's reading/writing data)
I saw it still had the previous problem, no autoplay no nothing showed up, showed no amount of space on My computer and was labeled "Local Disc G:" When i know i've renamed it "Mike's harddrive".

So i created this thread, drive still plugged and light on (Not flickering)
Then after the thread was created it started flickering and making noises like a processor would, it then popped up on the computer, giving me the option to scan the drive for errors or continue without scanning.

I scanned the drive (Which is still running, and probably will for a long time: Progress

Sorry for being over-overcautious with this, i have things i want to keep on the drive.

And to answer your question, It has two devices on there, One is "USB" and one is "ATA", I only have one external drive connected, and this being a laptop, not sure if my Local disc should show.
Both are on these policies: Here

gregrocker said:

As to the external HD back up the data from it and run a Disk Check on it with both boxes checked as shown in tutorial.

This is the method that has been running, But i haven't backed up the data as i cannot access the drive, even if i was able to, i don't have a drive to fit the 500 odd GB of data. I assume it's going to take forever, roughly around 7 hrs now, not even close to finishing.

As for the other methods not sure as of yet, i shall wait till this is finished.

Also thanks to Dave and Greg, i shall leave System reserved as was, good job i hadn't booted.

Marking another partition on the same HD Active will mark the other Inactive automatically since only one can be Active per HD.

See if you can see data via Disk Mgmt Explore on the partition. If not running Disk Check may scramble some of the data even if it can repair the HD. If this can't be risked try data recovery first using a program like Recuva - Features