Hi could some kind sole help me from committing murder to my pc
OK my problem is that I have 2 kids and they pester the life out of me to download movies for them not the latest greatest just older stuff anyway to the problem I would normally download a movie transfer it on to a external hard drive which is a terrabite in size so there is loads of storage and up to now I think there is 40 movies in there all was well with this method until last week when I downloaded a couple of movies for them and when I came to send them off to the external hard drive it kept failing coming up with error reports saying it was not recognising the path or there was a problem with the I/0 its not the movies as I can watch them on the pc and its not the external hard drive as when I plug the external hard drive on the DVD player it works and I can transfer movies on to the pc to watch from the external any help would be gratefully received I think shooting my kids is also an option but only as a last resort…
lol, I know the feeling.
I’ll assume your using Windows XP or Windows 7 - if you have Vista delete it immediately 
I’m on my Linux machine at the moment, so I can’t do a click walk through, but you need to find the volume manager. If you have the external drive plugged in, it will be listed there. Once you have copied all the files off, right click on the drive and select the format option, and choose the NTFS option. Here is a Microsoft page on how to do it with XP.
Format drive with NTFS on Windows XP
Dropping a disk is never a good thing, so it might explain the odd behaviour, but the format will tell us if there are lots of bad sectors or not. It will also mark them as bad, so you might lose some capacity, but what you are left with, should be good.
Regards
Nick
Oh and dont worry about me and my wife having a row we have them all the time and yes she wins them all
Hi Nick
You are spot on with what you have said so far as my wife has said the same thing we are going to empty the external hard drive and then re-formatting it,we will do as you suggest and do it in NTFS how do we do that, also the drive has been dropped ,but it has been dropped before and it was OK I know that dropping it is not a good thing but it was only a little drop and I have just transferred stuff this morning off the external back on to the pc and it worked so I assume its not completely knackered what are your thoughts
thanks
Steve
I really don’t want to start a row in your home but I can’t see the processor making much of a difference as although it will be involved, it should be more than capable of copying files.
I would try copying all the files you have off the external drive to another internal drive (if you have the space), and then try re-formatting the drive. It may be the drive has failed or is failing and it will tell you. I would also format the drive with NTFS , rather than fat32.
Has the external drive been dropped at all?
regards
Nick
Hi Nick
thanks for getting back to me, the file system I am using on the external is fat32, and there is over 320gb left on the hard drive and the size of the files I am sending over ranging from 700 mb up to 1.48 gb, so well under the limit of what it said on wykipidia. My wife who is way more savvi than me with computers has said that my pc is really old and thinks it may be the processor, would that make sense and if that is the case do I just need to get my gun out and kill this pc and get a new pc.
Couple of quick questions, what Operating system are you using and what filesystem did you put on the external hard disk?
Can you copy any other large files to the drive or it just these new files?
Can you give us details of exactly how much space is currently being used on the external drive.
There is a reason for these questions, as certain filesystems have size limitations, which you may have reached. Here is a quote from Wikipedia on fat32 for instance.
“The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GiB minus 1 byte or 4,294,967,295 (232−1) bytes. Video applications, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit. Larger files require another filesystem, such as NTFS.”
Regards
Nick