I’ve had a 750gb Western Digital external HD for nearly 4 months. I’ve only used this drive for housing photographs for my business. Currently, there are approx. 60 GB of photos on the drive.

A week ago, I noticed that the drive didn’t seem to be functioning properly. It was really slow (more than normal) and sometimes would freeze up.

I tried to get a particular photograph off of the drive yesterday and it was a complete failure. I have approx. 35 different folders of photographs (each for a different client) on the drive. When I open the folders, 1 of 3 things happen:

-Everything is completely normal. Some of the folders are totally fine.
-I can see all of the photographs as thumbnails, but when I try to open them, they freeze. I can’t even copy them to my desktop.
-Some of the folders will open and half of the thumbnails will show up as the actual photographs and half will constantly remain the default blue sky.

Needless to say, I’m a little panicked. There has been no physical damage to the drive. I’m not really sure what changed.

After doing my homework, I downloaded the drive diagnostic software from WD. These tests "failed" claiming that there were "too many damaged sectors." If I restart my computer with the drive attached, it attemps a chkdsk but freezes up halfway through.

Now, I’m manually checking the disk. Though, it has been going for nearly 20 minutes and I can really tell if anything is happening.

Of course, my main concern is getting these photographs off of the drive. It is especially frustrating when I can see them as thumbnails but not access the actual files.

What can/should I do? I really appreciate the help.
Nope. Completely quiet.

that will not delete necessary files, passcodes and good things but get rid of bad if you dont know much about computer. I need a free and safe one
I have windows xp, a dell computer, commodo, esquared, yahoo antispy.

My computer freezes up to hundreds of times a day, crashes and is real slow.

I tried deleting big files, scans,. defrag, disk clean up and scanned and did recovery of disk errors.

None of that helped. I put off registry cause I heard if you aren’t computer proficient you can mess up your computer. Is this true and any safe for newbies free registry cleaners or what else might help with these problems..using the computers has become frustrating with all these freezes.

I need simple advice to help me speed up my slow running computer please. All helpful suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

the person i date with wrote a love letter for me, but this letter ended up having more blank pages than written pages.

Hi,

I just built a PC with the following new components:

Intel C2D E8400 CPU
XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 CPU cooler
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R Motherboard
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard drive
SAPPHIRE 100265HDMI Radeon HD 4830 512MB Video card
CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W Power supply
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 Sound card

I used the following used components from my old rig:

2 x 512MB PQI DDR 266 PC2100 (I am waiting for new RAM: Patriot Viper 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 800 PC2 6400)
Seagate Barracuda 160GB 7200RPM hard drive
DVD Drive
DVD Burner

I installed everything very carefully. PC booted normally, I did not make any changes in BIOS. After I finished doing a clean install of XP, the computer just keeps freezing after a minute or two while performing any regular task such as surfing the web, or accessing the C drive. It lets me install a driver or software once in a while and sometimes it will freeze during an installation. It just freezes everytime, it won’t just not freeze at least once. I was wondering if it is the old RAM memory 2 x 512MB that is not enough for this setup or too old? I even uninstalled the sound card, the DVD burner, and left only the 160GB hard drive but it keeps freezing. Any ideas? All I have hooked up now to the MB and CPU is the video card, DVD drive, 2 x 512MB, and 10GB hard drive.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Case is an Antec Lanboy if this helps…
Sorry I meant 160Gb hard drive not 10GB