Question Explorer hangs on accessing one particular HDD, but drive itself is not faulty ?

benjamin4077

Honorable
Aug 24, 2016
25
0
10,530
And no, the drive is not faulty. This is a very peculiar problem. Please read on.

Schenario - I have Windows 10 installed on a Nvme SSD and also have 4 internal HDD in my PC. One of the drives contains my office data, a 2 TB Seagate drive with 543 GB free space. I have named this drive "My Data" and its volume letter is "D".

The Problem - After booting, I open "My Computer". It opens OK and shows ALL drives. Then I try opening "D". It opens the drive window but no contents visible. And Explorer hangs. Mouse & keyboards are working but cannot access any other drives or desktop icons.

After repeated attempts to close that window by clicking on "X" button (upper right corner), it does close finally. Then I open other drives. They open OK. Again I try opening "D" and it too opens OK! Every time after a fresh boot..

I thought cables may be faulty so interchanged cables. Same problem with only "D" drive. Then installed all new cables, but same problem. Then I installed new HDD and copied all data from old "My Data" to new Toshiba 2TB drive. Drive letters changed. But same problem persists with this brand new HDD. If I open other drives first one by one and then open this ""My Data" it opens OK. Thereafter no problem accessing this drive until next boot. The drives (both the new & old) are not slowed down or anything. They are as fast as before when they do open.

This problem started two months back after I formatted my C drive and installed latest Windows 10. Now I have installed 2H21 upgrade to Windows. Even now, the same problem. All hard drives use NTFS file system.

Is there any solution except a re-install of Windows?

I have this build-

Intel Core i9 9900K @ 3.60GHz
RAM 32.0GB
Motherboard - ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XI HERO
Graphics card - 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (MSI)
Windows installed on NVMe drive Samsung SSD EVO Plus 1 TB
4 other HDD, 3 of Seagate and 1 of Toshiba
 
Last edited:

benjamin4077

Honorable
Aug 24, 2016
25
0
10,530
do you have indexing on for the drive?
Yes. Indexing was on for all drives. After reading your query I disabled indexing on all but C drive. Rebooted. And the problem persists. Will try rebuilding the index now. The peculiar problem is that the problem persists even after cable change, replacing the HDD with brand new one and changing drive letters. Only common thing now is the data I copied from old to new HDD.

I think it is not a hardware problem. It started after I reinstalled Windows 10. And now updated to 2H21.
 
Last edited: