Seems like this is the one place that I always get answers to my questions..so I will try again.

I seem to be having a big problem with windows explorer encountering an error and closing out within a few seconds of my looking at any file on my storage hard drives.

My setup is an MSI motherboard with an Athlon64 3000 CPU. (754)
I have a gig of ram and I have 4 hard drives. (Yes..I have the power supply to push them all...Thermaltake 420)

2 of the hard drives are SATA
2 are regular ATA

No hard drives are in a Raid config..

One of the SATA drives has my platform (XP w/ SP2)
The other 3 are storage....no..not porn.....

The system seems to work fine unless I try to go into a folder on one of the hard drives I use for storage to view or access a file.
Then windows explorer will tell me it has encountered an error and needs to close.
While it can happen with any of the storage hard drives, the one that it happens far quickest on is the SATA that I am using for storage.

I have all the latest updates from Microsoft.
I have cleaned the registry
I have run Ad-Aware
I have Norton 2005 updated with the latest virus files..

It can happen as quick as a few seconds after I click on a folder on the storage hard drive.

I am at a loss to figure out what is wrong..past that it is Microsoft.
So...assuming that I am not going to wipe XP...what is going on and how can I fix this?

10/12/2005 2:56:04 AM

format and reinstall

10/12/2005 3:01:17 AM

I hope that is not my only option.
I was hoping to try a few fixes and screw things up until XP would not run first.

That or actually fix the problem without wiping everything.

10/12/2005 3:30:57 AM

did u install drivers properly? to not be able to acces either of the 2 ATA drives or SATA drives makes me think that you either have bad connections with the cables, etc or that the wrong drivers were installed or just not properly installed. have u tried taking out the ATA drives and pluggin them into another comp?

10/12/2005 9:17:08 AM

Quote :

"format and reinstall"

safest bet

10/12/2005 9:20:22 AM

you must purge the evil demons from your hard drive with fire

10/12/2005 11:17:27 AM

I've noticed Windows Explorer slows down like hell when I have too much crap in my "Downloads" folder, and I have a reasonably fast machine (NTFS, indexing on, blah blah blah).

Can you do a "dir" from command prompt?

10/12/2005 12:57:09 PM

I will try.
Right now I have very few files on the main C: drive.
Most all files that I have are stored on the other drives.

I am going to play with this a day or so more...and I am going to change out the SATA cables to see what happens...
if these do not fix it, I am just going to wipe and re-install XP

10/13/2005 1:20:36 AM