USB External Hard Drive Stops Working During Transfer

[seanlyons318]

I am trying to transfer files from my old XP machine to my new WIndows 7 machine, but every time I try to transfer the files, the external drive reboots itself.

A few weeks ago, I was able to transfer a number of files from my USB drive to my Windows 7 machine. Last night I tried to transfer some more, but the external drive would reboot after a few seconds of transfering data. This means that: yes it would connect; yes it would be available in explorer, and yes, I could open it to see the contents. However, when I would select a folder and drag it to my desktop, it would start to transfer and then reboot (the external drive). After this, it would just constantly cycle on and off until I turned off the power.

I did some research and it sounds as though it might a power starvation issue, but my drive has a separate power cord that I have plugged in to a working outlet so I can't make sense of it.

Two final notes:
1) It orignially worked on both my XP machine and my Windows 7 machine. Now it only works on my XP machine (doesn't work on my Vista laptop, but I hadn't used it there before so I have no baseline.) The only thing that I have changed on my Windows 7 machine is the BIOS (MOBO is Gigabyte P55A-UD3) for a display issue (computer would freeze when videos were played on full screen).

2)I updated the USB drivers in the hopes that this would fix it (nope).

Anyone know what could be causing this to happen?

 

[seanlyons318]

I was attempting dump some files onto my XP box and after ~ 1 minute of transferring the external HD rebooted. I'm assuming that the HD is just junk at this point. I've managed to save my files by adding my XP computer to my home network and sharing the folders with my data. In the end this was much easier, and I probably would have done it sooner had my stubbornness not forced me into trying to fix the HD issue.