very slow external HDD data transfer - a bit confused :(

[paolow]

can anyone shed any light on this? ive got a p3 866 machine running win 2K that ive just run a full clean install on. Before wiping everything i got hold of a maxtor 250 gig external 'one touch' drive that i transferred all my data to. it worked really well and it all landed there (including a 37 gig video clip) pretty quickly. However, now its all working the data will not transfer back across properly. When i try to copy and paste the big file it rekons it will take 3 mins or so, but, when the time is up, only about 250 mb has actually transferred and the counter jumps to about 600000 minutes remaining. this is very wierd! task manager shows the cpu working at 95 - 100% so its thinking pretty hard but clearly getting nowhere. can anyone shed any light? theres no real help on maxtors website and i need to get this file across! Its connected via a usb 2 card that ive just installed and windows rekons everything is working ok. it recognises the drive and there are no apparent problems - just very very slow! could it be that my anti virus / spyware kit is scanning the incoming files and its taking forever? would that really slow it to that degree though? any suggestions gratefully recieved!

[xiphias]

Have you installed sp4 ? Chances are the drives only running on usb1, as usb2 drivers aren't installed. USb1.1 = 11Mbit/sec usb2 = 480mbit/s !

[aldi]

Don't beleive the counter and the 6000+ minutes thing, just leave it to it and it will finish eventually. Aggree with previous comments re. usb1/2.

[annodomini2]

With that age machine I would question whether or not it has USB 2.0.

Plus generally only certain USB ports are 2.0, they usually have a 'USB 2.0 High speed' sticker in red and blue next to them. Check which one its plugged into.

EDIT: Sorry if i'd read the post correctly, yeah check drivers.

>> Edited by annodomini2 on Wednesday 14th December 21:42

[paolow]

wicked - cheers guys - ill check all of that when i get home on the weekend. I was getting pretty tired with it having spent all day there so its quite possible i may have made a school boy error!