Something crossed up via USB & ext.drives

[bongoman31]

To make a long story short, I've figured out that I've messed something up. I use a strong laptop with 2 external hard-drives, which has worked pretty good for some time. I have only 2 USB ports. So i'm often switching them around, when not using both HD's my mouse connects via USB. Well yesterday, in switching them around, I must have screwed something up. I'm getting a frequent error, something like- cannot find the specified path; this when trying to use various programs, or even to delete a file. The reason I've isolated it to a port screw up problem, is either drive will work fine when connected alone to USB, but with both I get probelms. Any help to correct appreciated.

[zapco]

I had a very similar problem when I plugged a friend's USB drive into the same bus that mine was on: I started getting all sorts of weird file-transfer-related errors when they were both plugged in, but if I unplugged his, mine had no problems. His drive was hosed, though - three difference PCs (two running XP SP2, one running W2K SP4) would completely freeze up as soon as I plugged it in.

My only solution was to plug it into a Mac running OS X, which was able to read it so I could get everything off it, and then reformat it (I'm guessing Linux would be able to do the same thing). Evidently XP had screwed up something in the directory/MBR of his drive when I first plugged it in.

If you've got enough storage space, you might try copying everything off each drive and reformatting them...