Trouble Moving Files from My External Hard Drive
Asked by
TechieTina99
I'm having a tough time with my 3 TB WD My Book external hard drive that I got from my boyfriend. It's a bit older, and I reformatted it twice after cleaning it out because I wanted to use it for my own files. Initially, I struggled with partitions because the format I chose didn't support the full size. After the second reformatting, I was able to access the entire capacity and even transfer large files without issues. But now, I'm stuck—about a month later, I can't move some important .mp4 files back to my internal hard drive. The files play perfectly but when I try to transfer them, it gets stuck at 5% and then says the source file can't be read. I'm confused because I can play the videos. I'm hoping there's a simple fix. For now, I've been using DaVinci to render and save them to my internal drive, which works, but I'd love to resolve the transfer issue directly.
Answers
First off, did your boyfriend use this drive without any problems before? If so, check the drive's health using a tool like Crystal Disk Info; it can help identify issues. Sometimes, drives can have underlying problems that only show up later.
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Have you tried just turning it off and back on? Sometimes, a simple reset can resolve a ton of weird issues with drives. It sounds silly, but it can really help!
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It might be an issue with USB power saving settings. Go to Device Manager on Windows and set it up so your computer won't turn off the USB port to save power. Also, make sure your drive is formatted to NTFS instead of FAT32 as that might help too!
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TechieTina99: Thanks for the tip! I just checked and it’s NTFS, but I totally forgot about the USB power saving—I'll look into that!