I got a new laptop (HP dv6700t running Vista Home Premium) that I need to hook my external HDD (500GB WD in generic case) to via USB. Windows Explorer freezes and the external HDD activity light constanly runs as soon as it's plugged in and it unfreezes as soon as it's unplugged.

I deleted "INFCACHE.1" from "C:\\Windows\INF" at the instruction of a blog and it worked for a few minutes, but it froze during the transfer of a few movies and hasn't worked since.

All help is appreciated.

This thread suggests how to un-confuse Vista. Deleting the file did not trigger the self-healing protection in Vista. Follow the thread if there are important differences.

Have you applied all updates to Vista?

I uninstalled the HDD in "Device Manager" and redeleted "INFCACHE.1" to no avail. When I disconnected the HDD this last time a window popped up and told me that I needed to format the drive for it to work, but that isn't happening. Besides, how can it format if it can't communicate without freezing?

And yes, all updates have been installed. There was even one today.

Thanks for the help, but I think I'm going to just get a 4GB flash drive and transfer files that way. I was looking at the XP-Vista USB data cables and wondering to myself why Microsoft would not make Vista completely backwards compatible with XP. I think that is my problem because my external HDD has been used with an XP machine and now Vista wants to format it.