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Computer freezing during and because of backups


buckdog05

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I set up my mom's Toshiba laptop running Vista Home Premium up a while back to run backups using a Western Digital External Hard Drive and the built-in Windows Vista backup program and it worked well for a while, but eventually the computer started freezing during backups, to the point where it could only be shut down by holding the power button down.

She unplugged the hard drive and the computer stopped having trouble, and when I came home I tried to fix the problem by running chkdisk on the external hard drive, reformatting the external hard drive, and trying different backup software, but it kept having the same problem.

It also had the same problem when trying to manually copy her pictures folder to the external hard drive. It didn't happen immediately, but somewhere midway through the backup.

I figured the hard drive was bad and set her up with Carbonite Online Backup and she is having the same problem. As she has a lot of files on her computer, they did not get uploaded during the first day she had the program installed, and her computer was working well until today when she texted me this morning and told me that it froze up during the backup again and will not even let her access her Yahoo.

I told her to boot into Safe Mode and run do a disk check on her C Drive, but I was wondering if you have any suggestions if this does not work.

Thank you!

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Update-She tried doing the disk checking by right clicking on the disk after booting into Safe Mode, clicking on properties, clicking on "tools," and then clicking on "check the disk for errors" or something similar.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

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Sorry! Was not posting again to bump, but rather to give an update but I should have just edited the previous post.

Anyways, the laptop is a Toshiba L300 series L305-S5907. It has a 15.4" Display, Intel® Centrino® Core™2 Duo Processor T3200 2.0GHz, 4gb of ram, and a 320gb hard drive.

Thank you!

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Since it is a notebook, it may be possible that its power plan is interfering with the operation of the system. Check and make sure this backup is being done on AC power and not on battery to start. Then make sure that the computer is not set to go to sleep or into hibernate, and that you disable the option to power down the hard drive. If you make any plan changes like this, best to do it on the "Plugged-In" plan so that there isn't a big rush to change them back when you are done.

Also, the computer freezing up may not just be the hard drive. You could also have faced a situation where the PC ran out of memory. Check the Event Viewer to see if there are any errors or warnings that appear. If it is a drive read or write issue, you will have some messages relating to disk0 or disk1 or something similar. Also, unless its necessary, unplug it from a network and/or turn off the wireless, and make sure no other programs are running. You may also try disabling the anti-virus during the transfer.

I am also wondering how much free hard drive space there is on the computer. Sometimes people have said that their computers have difficulty copying large amounts of files with similar behaviours that you are describing. Try only copying in small chunks to see how well that works. And by small chunks, maybe 500MB to 1GB worth.

Lastly, this external hard drive, is it connected to USB and is it formatted as NTFS?

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