Hard Disk Monitoring

Hi.
I have rather strange problem, it all started some time ago when I had Hard Drive Inspector as my monitoring tool, I have to describe the problem, because it continuous even now with Sentinel free edition.

Description. After I connect my external USB HDD separated into into 3 logical partitions (total 1 TB) and autoplay starts reading this HDD this pop up appears "server busy switch to retry", next, autoplay stops, usually after reading 1 partition, PC becomes unresponsive, and I can turn it off by power button only. I know for fact that this my external HDD is the problem, because I did complete restore using Acronis to 1 month back (so no viruses malaware and such, and any new installations and upgrades can be blamed). Also, I attempted to connect this HDD to my backup PC and the same thing is happened. So, I tried with XP Home SP2 (main PC) and XP PRO SP2 (back up PC). At the same time I am able to connect and operate without any problems my flash drives and multiple portable external USB HDDs (with single partition each). Also, I am able to connect the problem HDD to my main PC in the Safe Mode without any problems

After vigorous testing i came to conclusion that there is 2 programs were to blame, Hard Drive Inspector and MalawareBytes (MBAM). Without any one of this program everyting working fine, strange, I know. I wish to keep MBAM (cannot find any suitable substitution for this beatiful thing) so I started looking for Hard Drive Inspector substitution. I needed only monitoring tool so after many tools testing I came to Hard Disk Sentinel, which is the best so far, thank you for this. However, some type of problem still exists:
When I connect my external 1 TB HDD (with 3 partitions) with Sentinel "on" right after the booting into the windows everything is o.k., next I disconnect, all good here, next I am trying to connect back same HDD and PC usually freezes after reading first partition. Sentinel is able to display temperature in system tray, but as soon as I click on it (or open My Computer) PC freezes. The only way around it is to turn off Sentinel prior to connection of external USB HDD, and turn it back on after connection - no problems in this case.

Any Ideas?

Any suggestions appreciated...
Thanks in advance for any input.

P.S. I did not know where to submit this question, don't blame me for incorrect Forum pls.

Hi,

I suspect there is no physical issue with the drive (if Sentinel can read and display the temperature, it is nice).
I think one of the partitions on the USB disk may have an AUTORUN.INF and a malware executable which is launched after connection of the USB disk to the system (or when you try to open by a double click in Explorer).
These files may be hidden (only visible if Windows Explorer is configured to show hidden/system files).

The best would be if you can use the Report menu Send test report to developer option while the USB disk is connected. This would give more details about the USB hard disk details and would confirm if the drive may have any troubles. However, it is hard if the complete system freezes, which is really weird.

So I recommend the following test steps (which may allow creating a such report):

1) Can you please confirm what happens if you try holding SHIFT while connecting the USB drive? This would disable Windows XP autorun feature, which prevents this from starting (if this is the case).

2) I'd test what happens if the USB drive is connected before starting the PC, Windows and Hard Disk Sentinel (so there is no connection/disconnection during the Windows session). This would confirm if Windows new device arrivel / device removal notifications have some issues.

3) Also I'd test what happens if the USB drive is connected and then Windows is started in SAFE mode? Hard Disk Sentinel should work in safe mode also and detect disk information.

4) If none of the above helps, please start Hard Disk Sentinel as HDSENTINEL.EXE /REPORT
This should immediately create a HDSentinel_3.10 PRO_report.txt file to the folder of Hard Disk Sentinel with the details. If you can send to info (at) hdsentinel (dot) com , it would give more information.

The above may give more information about the situation and we'll have better picture to see the source of the issue.

Thanks a lot for a very informative post.