External harddrive crashing?! dr watson postmortem debugger

Question

whenever i go to open the folder to my external hard drive and even my recycle bin, the error message pops up saying that windows has encountered a problem and then after i click don't send, right after that, another window pops up saying that dr watson postmortem debugger has encountered a problem and whenever i click the don't send on that one, my computer freezes up and i have to restart it. how can i fix this problem? can it be done without erasing everything on my harddrive?

Answer 1

It sounds like your hard-drive has some problem, these are typically either a filesystem or magnetic system problem. For a filesystem problem, I would try running scandisk on it.

For a magnetic system problem I would try spinrite from http://grc.com

I would try scandisk first (from the run dialog box), because it is free and there. If it has similar problems, I would buy a copy of spinrite.