External Hard Drive keeps freezing on Windows PC

One of the most convenient ways to increase your computer’s storage is by plugging in an external Hard Drive. However, this has not been the case for most users, according to them, the external Hard Drive keeps freezing whenever they try to access a file or open an app. This is very counter-productive and should not happen to any of our readers. In this post, we are going to talk about what you need to do if the external hard drive is giving you a hard time.

Why does my external hard drive keep not responding?

Usually, an external hard drive will fail to respond if there is a bad sector in your hard drive. When trying to access that sector, your computer will stop responding and will freeze. In that case, there are various solutions that you can try. However, it is not the only thing that can force your hard drive to freeze, if your system files are corrupted, you will fail to access the external drive. Hereinafter, we are going to talk about all the potential solutions to resolve this issue.

External Hard Drive keeps freezing on Windows PC

If External Hard Drive keeps freezing on your Windows computer, or if applications freeze when the external hard drive is connected, follow the solutions mentioned below to resolve the issue.

Disconnect and reconnect the drive
Check your External Hard Drive
Run Hardware and Device troubleshooter
Repair Bad Sectors using the command line
Reformat the External Hard Drive.

Let us talk about each one of them in detail.

1] Disconnect and reconnect the drive

The very first thing you should be doing if an external drive keeps freezing whenever in use is reconnecting the drive. Sometimes, the issue can be just a glitch, and reconnecting is a simple but effective option that can do the trick for you. So, go ahead and disconnect your external hard drive, restart your computer, and then connect the drive. Hopefully, this will do the job for you.

2] Check your External Hard Drive

Next up, we need to check for the hard drive and make sure that there is something wrong with the drive or files. We will be using a built-in Windows feature to check for this. Follow the prescribed steps to do the same.

Open File Explorer.
Click on This PC.
Right-click on your external drive and select Properties.
Now, go to the Tools tab.
Click on the Check button from the Error Checking section.
Finally, click on Scan and repair drive.

The process will take some time, so wait and allow the Windows feature to repair the hard drive.

3] Run Hardware and Device troubleshooter

We can use another built-in program to resolve the issue, the Hardware and Device troubleshooter will scan your hardware, Hard Disk in this case, and resolve the error. To do the same, open Command Prompt as administrator and run the following command.

msdt.exe -id DeviceDiagnostic

Finally, follow the on-screen instructions to scan and resolve the issue.

Read: Check up Hard Disk Health natively in Windows using WMIC

4] Repair Bad Sectors using the command line

You may encounter this issue if there are some bad sectors in your hard drive. In order to resolve the issue, we will deploy the CheckDisk command to scan and repair the corrupted fragment of the hard drive. To do the same, open Command Prompt as an administrator and then execute the following command.

chkdsk C: /f /r /x

Make sure to replace ‘C’ with the letter of the drive you want to check. The process will take a little time, and once its done, check if the issue is resolved. Hopefully, your computer won’t freeze when plugging in an external hard drive.

5] Reformat the External Hard Drive

If the issue fails to resolve then the only way is to reformat the External Hard Drive. Now you may have some data on it. In such cases see if you can connect it to some other PC and take a backup of the data.

Having done that, you can Format the USB.

Hopefully, you will be able to resolve the issue using the solutions mentioned in this post.

Read: Fix Hard Drive Not installed problem on Windows

Can a failing hard drive cause freezing?

If your Hard Drive freezes and you are unable to do anything, remove the hardware and reconnect it. In case, that doesn’t help, execute the solutions mentioned in this post. We recommend you start with the first solution and then move your way down. Hopefully, you will be able to resolve the issue easily.

Read: How to test Hard Drive speed on Windows computer.