Resolved Strange external drive behavior

My OS is Win xp, sp3, home ed.
I have a Toshiba 320 GB USB external hard drive which has been performing very well until lately.
The Toshiba drive starts out by turning on and off over and over or running the Auto-play mode. An Auto-play box opens to tell me the device has mixed content and gives me a set of options so I pick “No action”. Somehow the computer sees the Toshiba drive as a CD! The Toshiba turns on and off for a long time (10-15 min) then it settles down, stays on and I can go in and out of it to enter or retrieve info normally. I have gone into the Device manager and other places and re-set all the Defaults where I can. This is a disturbing issue as I wish to have a dependable External drive instead of this “shaky” Drive but I believe the issue is in Windows Explorer and not the Toshiba drive.
I sure appreciate any insights or fixes someone has to offer for making the Toshiba more steady and reliable. Otherwise, I will have to figure out how and where to store important info.

Thanks for your feedback and help in this matter,
Jim

Update:
I went to Auto-play Properties and selected Default settings, then restarted computer. Toshiba did it's on/off thing then settled down sooner than usual. The Auto-play did not come on and the Toshiba drive is available to use normally. I guess I can live with this peculiar behavior if the Drive can be counted on to work. Is it possible that something needs to be change in the Services menu? What makes win. explorer see the Hard drive as a CD? Or difficult to open and run?

 

Thanks for the comment. I do not have another computer to test is in but might find one with some friend. Meanwhile, I tried the "uninstall USB controller" thing but there is no change in the drive. Yesterday, it was running so I copied some very important data from it onto CDs and now, today, the drive will not work at all. It just sits here turning on and off and can not be accessed in any way although it runs the Auto-play a little bit.
Thanks for your feedback,
Jim

 

Hi: thanks for the reply. It's morning and I went at that drive again. In some forum someone mentioned trying the drive in Safe Mode. It (Toshiba) works PERFECTLY in Safe Mode! I did all kinds of moves in there. Then back to regular mode and the Toshiba is working PERFECTLY now!!! I have no idea what changed or how or even if my wonderful Maintenance app. did the trick but the Toshiba is working just as good as it did from the beginning. Of course I have moved some very important files to CDs but I like the external drive for convenience. Yes, I won't be depending on it as a main or permanent back up system any more - WHEW!
Thanks again for your responses and help. If anyone can explain why the Toshiba is working so well again, I'd like to read about it.
Jim