External HDD problem - please help

[Chill Winstaan]

I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 - Hard drive - 250 GB - internal - 3.5" - ATA-100 - 40 pin IDC - 7200 rpm - buffer: 16 MB that in the past week will not open on my laptop (XP Pro SP2). I have checked and reinstalled drivers, it still wont work. Strangely, it will read on an iMac. When I connect to my laptop, autoplay runs through all of the directories, however when that completes and I go to browse the volume it freezes when opening. I tried cancelling autoplay but still no change. I have tried running a check disk to scan for errors, no errors appear on the volume.

I can read other USB devices, including a card reader with a 1GB card inserted.


Also rather odd is that when it freezes, if I disconnect the USB cable the root directory of the volume briefly pops up on screen before the window shuts altogether.

Can anyone please help with this? This HDD has a lot of invaluable photos stored on it.

 

[LA1]

can you see the hd if you go to control panel / admin tools / computer mngmnt / click disk mngmnt. What does it say ?

 

[Chill Winstaan]

Yes, it is visible.

For the respective columns:

New Volume (E, Partition, Basic, NTFS, Healthy (Active), 232.88GB, 152.46GB, 65%, No, 0%

 

[LA1]

when you plug in the usb hd, hold down the shift key that cancels autoplay,,,,, or at least it does for dvd's and cdrom's.

 

[Chill Winstaan]

OK, so here's where it gets strange. AVG Free 7.5 was blocking access to the HDD. Have since discovered that after completely reformatting my entire internal HDD and reinstalling Windoze from scratch. Seems that somewhere in an update from AVG they've killed my ability to access my HDD. So now I need to work out how to bypass that, or find another free anti-virus. Any recommendations on either front?

 

[LA1]

http://www.avast.com/