I am hoping that this is the proper forum to seek assistance for problems with external hard drives. I will pose my question and see if anyone has had a similar problem and if so, how was it resolved:

I have a Maxtor external HDD and a Seagate FreeAgent external HDD and when I attempt to copy large files or videos to these drives I get an error message that tells me Windows XP Home failed to copy all of the files and suggests it is a network or driver problem - then usually my PC freezes up and I have to do a power shutdown and reboot. The file I attempted to copy is incomplete.

I have Win XP Home on a Compaq pc with 960 MB of RAM.

Seagate tells me it is a Windows problem - could it be a USB driver problem? if so how do I troubleshoot it?

Many thanks for any input.

Mary

Because AntiVirus is probably scanning the files
And Windows is using lots of memory
And the USB HardDrive may be fragmented or even in need of a check Disk
It's hard to tell.

You could try in Safe Mode (F8 Repeatively during system startup)
Then go to My Computer and try again
If it fails in Safe Mode, it's probably:
Faulty Ram: run Memtest for 7 Passes
Faulty HardDrive run CheckDisk on the drive (right click-Properties-Tools)
Or it can be Pagefile set too low (Right click My Computer-Properties-Advanced...)

I'd also recommend CCleaner (in Normal mode again) and Defrag both drives

Thank you for the response and suggestions, kimsland - I will follow up on them.

I am a faithful user of CC Cleaner.

fdm2000

first, if you can, try large file transfers to those 2 externals using someone else's computer. I would bet it's an USB problem on your box...

Jeff wrote "I would bet it's an USB problem on your box..."

Thanks for your input - I am beginning to think you are right

fdm2000

How large were the files that you were trying to copy?
Somewhere from 2 to 4.5 GB approximately, right?