Problem With Hard Drive Freezing When Accessing Files

I've got an external hard drive (actually just an internal drive in an enclosure connected via usb) that is giving me a problem lately. When I plug it into the computer it shows up and gives me the autoplay dialog. It shows up in Windows Explorer and allows me to look at the properties. It shows me the directory tree and names of files. I've even been able to click on a small file and drag/move it onto my internal hard drive successfully. But with folders containing 40gb of videos or lots of photos Windows Explorer freezes. Both of my photo viewing applications freeze too if I use them to view the files. I need to loolk at these files to see if I need any of them and I need to save the videos!

I tried booting into safe mode but I can't do that because my mouse won't work (its a usb mouse) - this is probably a different issue though.

I turned off indexing for this drive through the properties dialog. I also uninstalled the usb driver for it, plugged it in and let it reinstall a usb driver. I can't make this drive allow me to view and/or move all of the files! What could be the problem?

My first point of suspicion will be the enclosure you are using.

Try connecting your HDD internally and see whether you can access everything normally..

Now a question that should embarrass you: Is it difficult for you to mention the manufacturer, Model Number, Capacity of the internal HDD and the manufacturer and model of the enclosure? When you have a problem with a device you should always furnish complete details of the devices involved - not just my PC, my external drive, my enclosure.

Sorry, I should have included more info. The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with an IDE connection. 160gb capacity, about 75gb free. I bought it in 2008 but it hasn't been used much in the last 3 years.

The enclosure is a Spire Gigapod II SP-121. Not much more I can say about it, it has a power cable and a usb cable. It only have an IDE connector inside for the drive. I checked but I don't have another IDE cable to try. I think I may have thrown them away because all my other drives are SATA. I did try a different usb cable from another drive enclosure (that one is a SATA drive) and its not the usb cable.

I tried to plug this into my small netbook computer and it does the same thing.

Oh, and I've pretty much only used it to store photos/videos when travelling. After a trip in January, I hooked it up to my computer and copied the "keeper" photos onto my internal drive (which has cloud backup). I left the videos on there because I didn't have space for them. I even used Premiere to edit some videos with the raw files on this drive and it worked fine. It worked fine when I last used it a month or two ago. It may have been a bit slower than SATA but it was ok for what it was being used for. I would really like to get those videos out of it though.

I ran a chkdsk on it. This was the result. So it looks like it should be good, right?

Maybe....maybe this will work! My fingers are crossed! I was able to copy two files (1 photo raw file and one mp4 GoPro clip that is 3.5gb in size. It copied successfully! I will try more...

Hopefully, after check disk corrected the file system deficiency in the MFT, you should be able to read the drive without any problem of freezing. If that happens, as AddRAM mentioned in his post#5, ASAP copy all data into another SATA drive and jettison your old enclosure and HDD.

Ok, here's an update. It started to work again as it did before. I don't trust it though.

I decided to spend $60 on a WD Passport external usb drive that I can use for the purpose of storing photos/video temporarily. I am moving the files over. A big chunk is some GoPro videos (38gb). My main data drive doesn't have enough space to permanently store them (I only have 45gb free) so they'll have to reside on the Passport for now. I'll have to upgrade that internal drive at some point and I was hoping to go SSD.

Do not buy WD external Passport, My Book etc., Those are hardware encrypted and should these drives fail - as these do most often compared to other brands - DIY data recovery is almost impossible.

WD My Passport Ultra External Drive Corrupted
"( You unknowingly got trapped and locked yourself out, buying a hardware encrypted Western Digital External drive.)"

Disk 2 is unkown, not initialized

You will be better off buying a good enclosure and a suitable internal HDD to go into it.