Freecom 250GB External Hard Drive Freezes computer – Help

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I have a Freecom 250GB External Hard Dive, which has worked fine for 2 years. However, in the last 6 months, if I turn it on after I have booted up windows, the mouse moves around ok, but my computer freezes and I can’t open or use any programmes/files etc. If I click on 3 or more files/programmes, then my mouse freezes too and the only way to shut down the computer is to press and hold the power button.

If I turn on the Freecom hard drive BEFORE booting up the computer then everything works fine. I have googled everywhere, but can’t find this problem. I can only find the computer freezing bit and not where it works ok if the drive is turned on before boot.

Can anyone help or got any suggestions ?

Thanks

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Hi maccers4321, Welcome to the Lounge.
Run check disk (chkdsk) on the hdd.

29700-RR

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Have you tried a different USB port?

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Try a clean boot to see if something is interfering with USB hard drive detection.

Another thing you could try is uninstalling the USB device drivers by following these instructions that I found here.

First step, Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. Create a restore point and name it something like “Before USB Fix”. This is to bail you out if something goes wrong during the following process and makes things worse.

Create a file with NOTEPAD containing the following lines and save it as FIX.REG
————————– Use text after this line ——————————–
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerEnvironment]

“DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES”=”1”
————————– Use text before this line ——————————–

Double click on FIX.REG and say yes to the Merge Into Registry question.

Unplug ALL USB devices.
Open Device Manager.
View, Show Hidden Devices.
Uninstall all devices under USB Controllers.
Uninstall all devices under Disk Drives that you know are not present.
Uninstall all devices under Storage Volumes. Say no to any reboot prompts until you are finished. Also, if a Storage Volume doesn’t uninstall, ignore it and move to the next one.
If you have a yellow ? with unknown devices, uninstall all of the entries there as well.

When this is done, reboot TWICE.

Reconnect the USB devices and see if they’re recognized properly.

NOTE: If you have a USB keyboard and/or mouse, you’ll have to modify the instructions and leave enough parts for those to function. I don’t have one yet, so I haven’t had time to modify the instructions.

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Hi,

Happy New Year and a big thanks to the 3 of you for the replies. I have tried all the suggestions one at a time in the order the replies came in. The problem still persists. However, I did try a boot into safe mode, as suggested by Jwitalka, then turned the drive on and the drive appeared in ‘My Computer’ no problem and worked fine. So, presumably something is clashing with it somewhere. Could this be another driver ? Where do I go from here ?

Hope your hangovers have cleared by now……….:)

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Try the clean bootdiagnostic procedure.

Jerry

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OK. I have tried the diagnostic and selective boot and neither of these worked.(With the selective one I hid all Microsoft services and disabled everything else, including start up entries). So, so far only safe mode and turning on the drive before a normal boot works. Could there be some Microsoft service/Driver that doesn’t start on safe mode that does start in diagnostic mode, that’s creating the problem ?

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You could try by elimination by doing a selected boot again but this time show MS services. Look for any that might be referencing hard drives or storage controllers. and disable one at a time do reboot after each one and test if fixed. If not fixed, re-enable the one you disabled and try another. Do this till one of them lets drive connect after boot then you know which is causing it and can then trouble shoot that service.

This will take some time and patience but may end up with resolving the problem.

Good Luck and a happy new year.

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Thanks Curious, I’ll give that a go over the next 2 days (Got some painting to do today, So have been told will have to do that first !!!)

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I used to face one very critical issue with my 320GB external Hard Drive. I am using windows 7.

PROBLEM:
Wheneven I used to connect the drive, the system used to freez completely. Hard reboot used to be the only way out.
Wait, life is not back on track yet. During reboot, the machine keeps on waiting “starting widows” screen. The next option used to be hard reboot again and keep pressing F8 button, select “boot into last known good configuration” and then you take the breath of relief.
Never dare to connect the drive again.

SOLUTION:
Initial guess was Symantec endpoint protection, thinking it starts the scan process and goes into huge data processing loop. Tried to disable but as it was office laptop and was installed with the client version only, not allowed.

The culprit turned out to be a different security software which was installed in this machine. “Bit9”, name itself sounds scary. Had to disable the running service “Parity agent” and the smile is back on face. Hard drive is working well.

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