I recently scratched loaded my laptop with Win XP SP3, all up to date, like this weekend. After everything was running fine and I was happy I performed a backup on an Elements by Western Digital 400GB USB External hard drive, all went well. Then I deleted all the other files on the external drive so that I had my backup before the reload (133GB) and after the reload (109GB). This makes the external drive about 69% full.
I did an Analyze and of course it can up with like 60 files, stuff in the System files (Restore points and such), and such as well as the 2 backup files. Tried to Defrag the drive and in the middle of defragging the drive suddenly shut off, disappeared from Defraggler (as it should), then it rebooted and Defraggler still showed it on whatever file it was on when the drive rebooted. Exited Defraggler but it was still running as a process. Killed the process and tried again this time selecting just the smaller backup file to defrag. Same results. Then I tried Defrag Freespace, same result except the process disappeared on its own after about 30 seconds.
Ok, here is the kicker. lol While writing this I was defragging with Defrag Freespace (Allow fragmentation) and was even accessing the drive via Windows Explorer, clicking on directories and files once in a while to ensure there is no port timeout issue and just before I started this paragraph, it was less than 50% defragged, the drive shut off again. Disappeared from Defraggler and showed back up, Defraggler is sitting on Drive C stating ready, Pause and Stop buttons are on, and I can only access Options, Priority, Shutdown after defrag, Drive Map Legend, About, and Exit.
Ok, here goes, clicking on Stop. lol Watching the process before and after, before sitting at 50% CPU and about 113,600k, then after clicking stop and waiting about 30 seconds the CPU went to 0, about 63,800k and the program returned to normal function.
I do not have the move large files to end of drive option set, I was moving them all the way up front, or trying to. lol
I did perform an Error check before starting on this drive, did one somewhere in the middle of this, and just did another, all 3 report no errors.
Any suggestions as to why the drive is rebooting itself?
Ciao,
Fred.
