External harddrive problem

[Thomas_C]

When i open my computer and view my external harddrive windows explorer crashes. However, If I type a shortcut (e.g. d:\films) to the harddrive then that folder opens ok. I can play media files from it. I just can't view it as D:\. Any ideas why this might be?

[vinnyT]

Does the same happen if you use 'my computer' and click on the external drive there?

[burble]

Open a command prompt, type 'd:\' (then 'cd \' if it doesn't drop you into the root directory) to switch to the drive and then use dir to get a directory listing - is there anything in the root that looks strange?

[Thomas_C]

Yup if I use my computer and click on the external drive then it opens the folder D:\ and then windows explorer crashes.

I opened the command prompt and used dir but there is nothing that looks strange. There is only 6 sub directories and nothing else.

[Thomas_C]

Hmm, I've changed the view to "view details" and now it works fine without crashing. However if I change back to view thumbnails then it crashes. Anybody have any ideas?

[burble]

Can you view thumbnails on any other drives? Try deleting thumbs.db from the root of the drive and see what happens.

[vinnyT]

It could be (though this maybe too far out) that explorer when in icon view on the external drive is trying to load the icons in too large a size ie trying to open many large files at once puts much strain on your system and can lead to a crash.

You can set the default icon size in TweakUI (free from MS, worth having even if it dosn't work for this problem);

1: open TweakUI,
2: expand the explorer branch, select thumbnails,
3: change the size to 32 (this is the same size as standard icons, so explorer should load as an icon, rather than a picture).

Hope this helps.

[Thomas_C]

I can view thumbnails on other drives fine. I've tried deleteing thumbs.db but no change

I'll try the tweakui option see if that helps. I was wondering if perhaps it was a file somewhere that was corrupted, could that be it? My only problem then is how to search through 500gb of movies to find which one is the broken one.