Windows explorer keeps crashing when opening external HDD

[spirez]

Could it be to do with the size of the folder?

My video folder is 350gb according to the properties tab and every time i open it i get the message "windows explorer has stopped working" and then it restarts.

My backup of this folder on another drive is 335gb and this doesn't happen. I have scanned for viruses, defragged, checked for errors etc and all that seemed fine.

The drive is formatted to NTFS

Any ideas how i can stop this happening?

Cheers

 

[The Hoff]

Check Event Viewer first and see if there's anything of note in there. How long are you waiting for it to load before pannicking? Give it a go, go have a shower and a dump, might just be doing the normal Windows thing of 'Not Responding' before coming back to life.

I'd probably then use a Linux LiveCD like Knoppix to boot to, and recover the files to a physical partition.

Failing that, try it on another PC and see if you get the same result?

 

[lau2908]

when you click onto your video folder , does it come up with the explorer has stopped working straight away, so you dont even see any files for a second? or does it attempt to load them but then stops working after a few seconds?

 

[spirez]

It's opening the folder and i can see the contents but before i get chance to click anything the explorer crashes.

Couldnt really see anything on event viewer.

I also just tried moving the folder from one HDD to another but the problem persists on the new drive. it makes me slightly sus that the folder is exactly 350gb, whereas usually it would be .something. I'm going to move half of it back to the other drive and see if the problem's still there.

 

[lau2908]

might sound silly buy try this, open say my documents, go to view then select "list", then go to view> folder options then click the view tab and click apply, so when you open the video folder they will show as a list an not thumbnails...try it honestly, it could be something to do with a video codec, so when it loads the thumbnails its using the codec to view the image an then crashing, worth a try

 

[lau2908]

might sound silly buy try this, open say my documents, go to view then select "list", then go to TOOLS> folder options then click the view tab and click apply, so when you open the video folder they will show as a list an not thumbnails...try it honestly, it could be something to do with a video codec, so when it loads the thumbnails its using the codec to view the image an then crashing, worth a try

TOOLS NOT VIEW AS I FIRST SAID