Acer becomes non responsive when external hard drive is connected

[compwiz02]

Booting in either normal mode or safe mode, if the external USB hard drive is connected, the laptop is not responsive. But if the USB is not connected, the laptop boots up fine. If I connect the USB after the laptop boots up, then the windows will start to become non responsive. It detects the hard drive but becomes non responsive.

The hard drive is actually from my primary laptop. It failed to boot up so I am trying to access it as an external from my back up laptop. When I used disk management to see the status of the hard drive, it says there is a cyclic redundancy error. When I did a startup repair on my primary laptop using a usb drive, it says the MBR had an error and the bootrec commands did not work because the drive could nto accessed and the device was malfunctioned. Not sure if the hard drive is broken...I do have files on it.

I have reinstalled the USB drivers and my back up laptop is free of viruses and malware....chkdsk and sfc scannow ran with no problems. sfc found and fixed all errors it found on the first run, but afterwards found none. But even after all scans, the external hard drive still makes the laptop non responsive.

Any ideas? Let me repeat, the laptop can DETECT the external hard drive, but it cannot access it. I can run chkdsk /f /f f: from the command prompt (F is the drive letter) but the command prompt will just stay there not doing anything.....the scan process will not start.

 

[samuria]

CRC error means bad blocks and it may be on the start of the disk were boot, MBR are if you goto makers site they normally have a bootable test for their drivrs

 

[compwiz02]

The external hard drive is a Western Digital an WD's website has a Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS tool but when I tried it out using USB, the tool could not detect my external hard drive. It detects my internal hard drive which is a Hitachi but not my external.

My Computer detects the external. It just shows the drive and the letter but does not show the amount of space the drive has. Disk Management detects the drive but shows the drive as Uninitialized.

Kinda confused at the moment.

 

[TrustMe]

Create a live Linux USB flash drive or DVD. Boot from the flash drive or DVD, then plug in the external hard drive. Backup all your files to a different portable hard drive or flash drive. Not the flash drive running Linux.

Live Linux means the OS is running off the flash drive. Nothing is written to the hard drive and when you shutdown, no trace of Linux is left. This is the program I used to make the flash drive.

YUMI - Multiboot USB Creator | USB Pen Drive Linux

I like Linux Mint because it is very similar to Windows 7. You will have no trouble using it. I used the Mate Desktop because I read somewhere it's best for the live version, don't really know if that's true.

 

[compwiz02]

So....how will the linux help me? It will be able to access the hard drive?

 

[RolandJS]

So....how will the linux help me? It will be able to access the hard drive?

If the HD itself is bad enough, no, nothing will access it very well at all. However, bypassing Windows entirely is one way to eliminate one major variable; with the booted Linux, there is a file manager that does not use Windows' explorer.exe, hopefully that file manager can access the problematic HD.

 

[compwiz02]

Sweetness.....using linux is fun. Accessed the broken hard drive. Apparently I was not able to fix the MBR....forgot the error message I got, but I was able to fix the NTFS file system which was not clean. Afterwards, I booted from the hard drive on my primary laptop and got a new error. This time, the MBR was fine and the hard drive had a label on it, but now the registry is corrupt so I gotta figure out how to recover my registry.

 

[TrustMe]

I'm glad it's working for you. Were you able to backup your personal files, documents, pictures? I would do that first.