Was wondering if someone can help with a techie question - I have an external hard drive, connected via USB. I've been using this with my laptop for a while with no problems. However, when I connect it now, it comes up under My Computer as a removable drive, but when I try to access it, the computer crashes. Any ideas on what's happening?

When it was working, did you used to disconnect it properly before you unplugged it from the computer? For example right clicking the drive and selecting 'remove safely' or 'eject'. If you haven't then it could have corrupted the hard drive, this especially happens when you are writing to the external hdd and do not properly disconnect them.

Other thing you can try is goto Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and from the left hand panel expand Storage -> Disk Management and see if it come up as a valid partition on the right hand side.

Even if its corrupt you can use a data recovery tool to get data back. I recently used GetDataBack from http://www.runtime.org/ to recover data from a corrupt memory card.

Ali

I don't recall not disconnecting it properly, but may have just got fed up with it and ripped it out!!!!!

I used the Computer Management, and it is showing up ok - but is showing as having 1TB free, even though I've got around 300GB of stuff on it. When I plug it into the PS3, it shows up everything ok, and plays all the files without a problem. Would the PS3 pick up the files even if the hard drive is corrupted?

Thats confused me Could be the partition table is corrupt (maybe PS3 reads the hdd different to the pc) or some virus/malware is on the hdd which on access is causing the crash. Couldn't be sure really. If you got 300gb free anywhere backup your stuff from ps3 to this free store.. do a full format on the external hdd and copy the stuff back.

Ali