if you fear that , can you use some drive diagnostics tools , generally all manufacturers have those on own websites , just run that it will show actual status

But I can't even plug the drive into the PC without the PC crashing!

The manufacturer is ezq.com. I can't see any diagnostic tools on their site. They said "send the drive back to us to check" - HOWEVER, the drive has a lot of confidential business info on it so I can't send it to anyone.

if the computer stops responding while boot process , (i assume you have other drive as master for booting) it suggests that there problem in boot sectors of the drive , which may be due to some virus , or due to bad sectors in that area.

if you dont expect bad sectors try using to BIOS virus setup utility to see if it helps

you just keep your fingers crossed and hope your disk is not dead completely

- It is an external backup drive not the main C drive.
- It connects via USB2 (firewire),
- I (not a virus) have accidently deleted system files from the drives root.

The result of the above is I can not plug the drive into the PC without the PC crashing.

Will BIOS allow view of a drive that is via a USB? I thought USB access was via the OS (I don't know much about this stuff).

Thats what i was saying , you need to have some boot up disk (any other harddisk would do) which can start your PC and then would be able to see your the sick drive after attaching it to USB

since you say you just deleted boot files , the problem is not that big , you just need some other boot up disk and then make your USB drive bootable , nothing much to worry i think

Hi Benevolent001

I wish I understood what you mean, this is not my hottest subject!

The PC will of course boot from the internal C Drive. Or are you saying to change it so it boots from the firewire drive? Is that possible on XP? How?

Hello kapow

Sorry i just read the whole thread again

What i have got is

1 ) You can use you computer normally now , using your internal disk c drive

2) You are using USB disk as backup storage and accidently deleted some of files from there.

3) Now when you try to reconnect the external drive with computer it hangs and stop responding

Now since i guess ,you were using external drive as just for storage so no real system files exits on that which can start the computer or are helpful

Can you tell what type of those files were and where were they residing on external drive

My straight guess goes for some virus nothing serious you have done to the system as per infrormation i have got.

Try to start the computer in safe mode , you can do that by pressing F8 while computer starts , it will give you option menu choose safe mode from that.Scan for virus

Then connect the external drive to see if the computer sees it or not

Hope it would help

Just wait for some time , someone will answer better then me over here and see what he/she suggests

Thanks and have nice day

Your XP installation is probably faulty. Deleting files should not cause XP to crash when the drive is plugged in. A hardware failure might, also if any autorun software was installed, that might cause a crash.

Before you waste huge amounts of time on this, try plugging the drive into another computer - my guess is that it will be ok. If available to you, try Win2000 since you are having problems with XP.

If that doesn't work, next question, what format is the drive, FAT32 or NTFS.

Kaled.

Sorry if this gets complicated, I was trying to avoid explaining how this happened because its a bit odd. However I'm wondering if the details will help so here goes:

1.)
- The backup drive is NTFS.
- I don't know what files I deleted.
- I have a backup program called Handybackup,
- The backup program copies files from the C drive to the backup drive,
- The backup program was set to delete files on the destination drive that are not on the source drive,

2.)
- I was backing up from a PGP virtual disk on the PC, to a PGP virtual disk on the backup drive.
- I have found that PGP virtual disks can get confused about where they should mount e.g.
- The source-pgp-virtual-disk was meant to mount to a folder on the C drive,
instead it mounted to D:\folder\ AND to the folder on the C drive (I have no idea how this occurs!),
- However the destination-pgp-virtual-disk was meant to mount to D:\folder\
- During the backup I noticed my folder on the C drive was creating 2 extra copies of its content within itself,
- At this point I stopped the backup,
- Now when I boot the backup drive a get a blue screen on the PC.
- NOTE: I tried the backup drive on my laptop and get the same crash (also Win XP).

Summary: I believe something in the above led to deletion of root-files on the backup drive. Remember I don't know much about this stuff so I may be using the wrong terms. I don't know exactly which process damaged the backup drive, I suspect that important files got deleted from the backup drives root. Its not a space problem as the backup drive as has 300GB free space while the data being backed up was about 4GB.

With respect to viewing the contents of the disk, there are no important files to delete!

Irrespectve of what files have been deleted, it should work.

However, if something is set to autostart, that procedure can crash. In your case, if a virtual disk is set to automount and that disk is corrupt, then this might well result in a horrible crash.

I don't use PGP but I suggest you uninstall it and try again. If you have any other disk utilities running, make abolutely certain they are closed down.

Kaled.