Hi everyone,
Quick question to all of you computer people out there.
I have one of those portable 'keyring' usb hard drive things that is giving me a few problems. I have the latest Norton Utilities that I think may be able to solve the problem, however here is the problem:

My computer at home automatically opens a window displaying the contents of the disk, whereby it crashes and refuses to do anything else.
There is a computer at work that does no do this, and therefore I have been able to recover a few, but not all files before it eventually crashes.
Norton Utilities will not run on the computer at work due to administrator privilages, so I was wondering if there was a way of stopping my computer at home automatically opening the disk on mounting. Then I can give it a go at home.

Thanks

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

 

Couldnt you plug the USB drive in while the machine is off?... Then when windows loads, you could try scandisk without the drive trying to show all its contents and crashing...


Chris

 

boot into safe mode

 

Hi Chris,
Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried starting the computer with the drive already plugged in. This is how I have managed to recover a few small files. Larger files will start to copy off the disk and then will stop and windows will ask you to please insert drive X:
I tried norton and I get one screen further before it decides that the drive is no longer connected. (I have not tried scandisk yet though)
It is a strange problem.

I have some data recovery software from DTIDATA.com (I think)
When you start the computer with the disk connected. The software is able to scan it. You get no read errors and all the files are displayed.
You can then select the files and press copy: But this time you get read errors at every sector and you can no longer access the disk until next time you restart.

I'll give scan disk a shot, but any other suggestions would be great

 

sounds to me like the pen drive itself is faulty.
get a new one and try that.

 

could it not be a windows / USB issue?

I'd windowsupdate & get the latest chipset drivers before you right off the hardware.

IMHO norton does more harm than good. . .