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Thread: External harddrive problem

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    External harddrive problem

    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?

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

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    Senior Member burble's Avatar
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    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?

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    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.

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    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?

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    Senior Member burble's Avatar
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    Can you view thumbnails on any other drives? Try deleting thumbs.db from the root of the drive and see what happens.

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    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.

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    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.

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