Can anyone help with my computer problem please?

TomsMom

Yesterday the electricity went off to some parts of the house. This is the second time in a fortnight this has happened and the house was rewired less than 12 months ago. Nothing to do with the weather.

The sockets and lights to some of the house went off and I checked the box with all the switches in (sorry, don't know the name) and the big one on the left hand side which says "RCD Circuits" underneath had gone to OFF. (All the other smaller switches have "cooker", "shower", etc. underneath.)
I flicked it back to ON and lights/power came back on.

My problem is that the computer was on at the time and it went off. I restarted it, it did some sort of a check FAT32 files????, (blue screen, white writing) said everything was OK, then I had to press the re-set button to restart again. Everything on the screen was BIG so I pressed CTRL + 0 and it went back to normal size. I had been logged out of my forums (which I keep permanently logged in) so that's all sorted now.

I have an external hard drive (WD Passport) and I couldn't access any files on it. I checked My Computer and it wasn't showing the external HD plugged in. I have two USB ports so I plugged it into the other one this morning, it loaded so I managed to copy the files I wanted to a memory stick.

I've been trying the external HD and the memory stick in both USB ports and sometimes it loads, sometimes doesn't and it's sounding the bell sound when it's not loading properly.

Does this sound expensive? A repair? A new computer (hope not)? Any ideas?

zfrl

Don't know about the computer but it sounds like you might have something dodgy plugged into the electrics. Irons are especially good at tripping the RCDs.

TomsMom

Thanks zfrl. A friend mentioned anything using water (iron, washing machine etc.) could trip RCD, but only other thing being used at the time was the gas cooker which is connected to the electric for the clock and sparky thing to light it.

I have a feeling the external HD might just be dying, I hope it is just that. I've tried the memory stick back in the two USBs and it worked in both at the time. Will give it another go later on. I'm trying not to call out computer chappy as the cost of calling him out will go a long way towards a new external HD if that's all it is.

When OH gets back from the hospital (snow prevents it at the moment), I'll get him to ring the electrician as well and see if he can throw any light on why it's happened twice in a couple of weeks. Maybe there's a fault there somewhere. I often hear a fairly loud click from the vicinity of the electric socket and phone socket when the computer's on but OH has never heard it (he's the sort if he doesn't experience it it doesn't happen :rolleyes:).

mumslave

It doesnt sound like a fault to me as such. My old laptop used to do that with my external hard drive too, sometimes the usb would recognise it, other times nothing would happen. I tended to have to jiggle the hard drive about, to get it to find it. No problem when I plugged my mp3 or card reader into usb port though. I think its more likely to be the hard drive than your lappy.

phxweb

Plug in the Drive then

Go to control panel, system, Hardware Tab, Device Manager.
Is there anything listed with a yellow exclimation mark. ?

TomsMom

Thanks Mumslave. It's actually my desktop computer but you've just made me realise that I can go and plug it into my laptop upstairs to see if it's the HD. I'm off to do that now, hopefully that will tell me if it's the HD.

JasX

Lesson: next time it trips switch off at the wall (ideally unplug) anythign remotely electrically sensitive before throwing the breaker back.... otherwise its a recipe for blowing something with a power surge.

Malski

This may be something to do when the computer came back on and the extrernal hard drive was still on, it was seen as a bootable disk. If yoou go to the run on the programs bar, type in eventvwr, hit enter, look at the system logs and you may get loads of possible errors saying something like Disk5 hardware IO error. Only way round this could be to re-format the external harddrive via disk manager, unless anyone knows any other ways round this?

TomsMom

phxweb wrote: »

Plug in the Drive then

Go to control panel, system, Hardware Tab, Device Manager.
Is there anything listed with a yellow exclimation mark. ?

Right - I'm there now. Yes, there is a yellow exclamation mark beside USB Mass Storage Device.

When I plugged the drive back in it keeps dinging the bell, message comes up with "There is a problem loading the device" or similar. Drive still not showing up on My Computer.

By the way, it loads fine on the laptop, so makes me now think that it's a computer problem not the external HD.

echelon101

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=2&lang=en

Try and download the driver.

phxweb

Ok so now double click the one with the Yellow ! A window will pop up, Select the Driver Tab then Try Roll Back Driver Or update Driver and follow the instructions