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When running CHKDSK surface scan on system Restart, it seems to automatically check all external USB drives as well as the system drive (C:), on my laptop, without me prompting it to. Is this normal operation of CHKDSK, or am I just "lucky?" The USB drive that is currently being tested is a 3TB backup drive with several large drive images on it. I have been relegated to my (very) old spare laptop. It took several hours to scan one file, #24 in "CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)." It has since moved on to file #35 of 752. It's been four hours, so far....

My OS is Win xp, sp3, home ed. I have a Toshiba 320 GB USB external hard drive which has been performing very well until lately. The Toshiba drive starts out by turning on and off or running the Auto-play mode. An Autoplay box opens to tell me the device has mixed content and gives me a set of options so I pick “No action”. Somehow the computer sees the Toshiba drive as a CD! The Toshiba turns on and off for a long time (5-10 min) then it settles down, stays on and I can go in and out of it to enter or retrieve info normally. I have gone into the Device manager and other places and re-set all the Defaults where I can. This is a disturbing issue as I wish to have a dependable External drive instead of this “shaky” Drive but I believe the issue is in Windows Explorer and not the Toshiba drive. My latest effort was to re set the Defaults in Auto-play and restart computer. Toshiba did it's on/off thing for a few minutes but no Auto-play thing and now it allows me to use it (Toshiba) normally! It's a little disturbing but I can live with it so long as the stored material is safe. Why does win. explorer see the storage drive as a CD? Is this a Services issue? Thanks for your feedback and help in this matter, Jim :D