Windows Vista External Hard Drive [freezes on Vista, OK on XP]

I am new here. I have a ROCK MOBILE DISK external disk. It will not transfer data back and forth without locking itself up. ( Light Goes Red) and locking up my computer. However i have hooked it up to my laptop running XP and seems to work fine. My desktop uses Vista. Why is this and is there anyway to fix it?

 

I have seen quite a few problems with ROCK external drives.

If it comes with software, then it may require that software to run. That software may not be Vista compatible or if it was set up on another computer, it may require acrobatics to get it to work on another computer.

Some software for external drives use encryption and you need to get the software to run to input your password.

I prefer to get rid of any software related to the drive by saving any data to a fixed drive, then removing the partition on the drive, making a new one and formatting it, then putting the data back.

The ones I have worked on are Maxtor portable external drives. I put the Maxtor software back on their upgraded computer, but I would have preferred to remove it. I can also see a situation where you could get locked out of your own data.

Matt

 

Thank you

Thank you for your help. I have tried formatting however and still the same problem. Works like a charm with XP but wont do a thing on vista without locking up. I wonder if there is a patch for vista that will allow it to read with out locking itself up. Im lost. Its very disappointing. Im very close to getting rid of vista all together. Causing me nothing but problems. I bought the computer with it on there so i only have the image and no way to go back to vista if i deside to later.

 

I don't have an external drive set up at the moment, so I can't check.

If you are happy to try again. In Win XP, right click on My Computer and select Manage. Go to Storage -> Disk Management. Right click on the drive and select Delete Partition. Make a new partition and format it.

There are some instructions here which are along those lines:
http://www.pc-how-to.com/hard-drive/repartition-fat32-ntfs.htm

Watch out for a small partition on the drive, that might be where any ROCK software/utilities reside.

I have searched on the ROCK website previously, but there is not much support. Check that the drive is compatible with Vista (look up it's system specs at ROCK).

I think it is that ROCK needs to work with Vista, not the other way around. Most products now have a label "Vista compatible ". Hardware manufacturers can upgrade their software and drivers to work with it, it's up to them to do it. It happens with all new Windows releases.

Matt

 

This makes me recall an issue we had with an external casing that contained my old PC's hard drive.

This kept freezing either Vista PC that it was used on, but we put it down to corruption on the hard drive (it was the master of the old PC, and thus had XP installed...). We didn't try it with XP though - our only XP PC is too temperamental to try such a daring feat.

It might be worth copying the data across onto the XP computer, then hard-linking the two PCs together and transferring data across onto that. Then, try and format it in Vista - see if that helps

 

Bingo!!!

Apparently Vista has (as i suspected) an extra security level that XP did not. This is what you see when it asks you permition to do something. THIS WAS THE PROBLEM. For me anyway.

For anyone having problems like this it may be worth a shot.
-Control Panel
-Add or remove user accounts
-Go to main users account page
-Turn user account control on or off
-(UNCHECK) user account control

This solved the problem for me so if your stumped like i was its worth a try.
I also split my 1000GB into 2 partitions. I was told this would help.