Problems With External HDD's

[KilnerLUFC]

So, as most people probably do here, I own 2 1tb external HDD's for my laptop, which hold all my music and films. Had one for quite some time, and absolutely no problems with it at all...until the other day that is. I restarted my laptop and it told me that it was scanning one of the drives to fix errors, but after only hitting 10% after an hour I gave up and restarted the laptop and bypassed the check. Loaded Windows and tried to manually check the drive for errors, only for it to tell me that there wasn't anything wrong with it. There is obviously something wrong because everytime I inset the drive it says it has errors.

 

Do I really have to sit and wait a lifetime for it to fix the errors when the laptop starts up, or is there another way of going about it?

 

The other problem I run in to with the drive is that WMP seems to get a corrupt library every other day too.

 

Now, all this was fine, and I could deal with it as everything was still playing fine and whatnot, but now last night I encountered a problem with both drives.

 

Went to play a film by double clicking in Windows Explorer, only for WMP to start up and tell me the file couldn't be played because it was on an external drive. Tried it with numerous films and they all encountered the same error. Gave it up in the end and put a DVD on, but now today it seems to have hit both drives, with WMP completely wiping all the library as if the drive doesn't exist, and Windows Exlorer won't let me double click and play anything, yet I found everything works fine if I drag and drop it in to WMP...even tried it with the films and they worked fine as long as they were in the "now playing" list.

 

Tried Googling this before asking here, but couldn't find anything specific enough to give me any help.

 

May be worth noting that both drives are formatted for the 360, but again, the first drive has been formatted for a while now and had no major problems, till now.

 

 

[X S]

Run the full check disk scan. I know it takes a while, but you need to exhaust your obvious options first.

 

IIRC, 360 required your drive to be formatted in FAT32, but there should be no problems using it on your PC/laptop. How old are the drives anyway? From personal experience, external hard drives always seemed more prone to failure than internals.

[KilnerLUFC]

OK, so left it scan and repair the drive overnight, and it seems to have so far done the job. It's allowing me to just double click and play films and music from the drives as it should do.

 

Funny thing is, it seems to have also fixed an error I was having with the Windows Apps, such as the Window Store force closing itself and Movies And TV saying it didn't exist. No good with tech at all, but seems odd that the broken external HD seemed to be causing problems with the Apps too...?