I've been having a frustrating issue with my external hard drives. Whenever I plug them into my PC, they freeze Windows Explorer and even Disk Management shows issues. This problem only occurs with drives formatted in NTFS. I've tested different NTFS hard drives, and they all freeze, but when I use partitions with other formats, they work perfectly. Interestingly, the same NTFS drives function without any problems on my laptop, which also runs Windows 11. Any ideas on what's going wrong?
2 Answers
It's possible that the drive format is impacting how your system reads the disks. You should check if your NTFS drives are set up as MBR or GPT, as that can affect their behavior on different systems. Also, see if there are any SMART errors or if the drives were disconnected improperly in the past. A standard disk check (chkdsk /f) could help too.
If the disk is MBR and you’ve already run checks without finding issues, the problem might not be the drives themselves. It’s odd that they work fine on your laptop but not on your main PC. I’d recommend looking into the USB ports you’re using or possibly updating your USB drivers.

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