External Hard Drive Over Network (Very Strange Problem)

sgrd267

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4
Location
USA
Here in the office, we have one main external hard drive that contains a lot of important files. I'm going to be reffering to it as the "sys" drive. Everyone in this office needs access to it, and it has always been connected to my computer.

Beginning last week, my computer began freezing and crashing a lot. So, we took my computer to a shop for repairs, and I switched to another computer. But oddly enough, I continued to have the same problem. Crashing in excess of 12 times a day.

After a while, we realized that my computer was crashing every time someone else on the network was trying to access the sys drive. We moved the sys drive to different computer on the network. But now, anytime I try to access the sys drive over the network, my computer crashes.

It doesn't matter how I access the drive; Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, Windows Explorer. If I go anywhere near this drive, my computer will freeze and crash.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be wrong? We're all at a loss. Thanks.
 
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EDIT: Go with what carnageX said down below, and also a NAS would come in handy
especially for an office setting
 
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I really hate to say this but it sounds like your drive must have some sort of virus on it. Another possibility is a mechanical issue with the drive, like it using to much power and you computer shutting off to save itself. However if you computer crashes even if accessing it through the network, then its most likely a virus or some sort of malicious program thats causing your computer to crash. The data could probably be restored if you brought it to a professional, however I would recommend one DIY option. Do you have any other machines that run different operating systems? I would try to access the drive from that and see how it goes. Hope this helps!

I highly doubt its a virus.

@OP: Have you tried running a chkdsk /f /r on the drive? Do this after hours so you don't interfere with anybody else's work.

Do you have all the files on it backed up to another location in case something is wrong with the drive?

You may benefit from setting up a NAS rather than just an external drive hooked up to a computer over the network.
 
sgrd267 said:
If I go anywhere near this drive, my computer will freeze and crash.
By this, do you mean that your computer is getting a BSOD (Blue screen of death)?

If it is, go and see if this directory exists on your C drive, C:\Windows\Minidump
If it does, share with us any .dmp files that correspond with the dates (and approximate times) of the crashes in question. This will help us tell you EXACTLY what is causing your computer to crash.

I'm going go out on a limb here though, and guess it's probably being caused by "ntfs.sys".
 
@Yevrag: I've only gotten the BSOD once. Mainly, everything glitches and freezes. Then I have to restart. No dump file was found at the path you gave me.

@Carnage: I haven't run a chkdsk on the drive yet, but we're in the process of backing it up right now. Here's a kicker. We're backing up the sys drive on another computer on the network. To test it, I also shared the new backup drive on the network. Same problem with this second drive. If I go anywhere near these drives, my cpu freezes and I have to force restart.

I'm beginning to believe this may be a network issue. I have other externals attached to my computer. So to try it out, I asked someone else on the network to try and access one of my drives. Once again, my computer crashed.

If anyone tries to access any of my drives over the network, I crash. If I try to access any of these other drives on the network, I crash. We've tried resetting the modem, switch, and router to no avail.
 
sgrd267 said:
@Yevrag: I've only gotten the BSOD once. Mainly, everything glitches and freezes. Then I have to restart. No dump file was found at the path you gave me.
Windows 7, I hope?
If it is, go to Start Menu=>(Right Click) Computer=>Properties=>upper left corner, click "Advanced"=>Find startup and recovery, click "Settings"=>Under system failure, uncheck "automatically restart"=>under write debugging information, in the drop down menu choose "Small memory dump (256KB)".

Now, duplicate the problem, wait for the computer to crash, sometimes it takes the computer a couple of minutes before it will resort to a BSOD. Once the BSOD has dumped the information, restart the computer and then do what I posted to do before.
 
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