External Hard Drive Question

[Chicago Jake]

Okay, you smart helpful geeks out there.

I have an external hard drive that is exhibiting strange behavior. Every once in a while, I'll get a popup on my screen saying "auto-play" and the old waving flashlight icon as it searches the external drive. I'll kill that, and another popup pops up saying "what do you want me to do with this device?" It has options like "open with windows explorer", "play with Windows Media Player," etc. The typical popup you'd expect when plug in an external media source.

The disk is full of photos and mp3 files, plus backups of My Documents. I don't want it to do anything. I just want it to sit there until I need it. But it seems to act as I just plugged it in, which I didn't.

Sometimes this will happen several times per hour. Other times, it will go a day or two before it happens again. Any thoughts on the cause and/or fix? Thanks!........Jake

[Robin Hood]

My first guess is a wonky power supply, I would HIGHLY advise getting a new external and backing your shit up to that one ASAP.

[Chicago Jake]

Well I never found an elegant solution to this question, so I went with an inelegant solution: I just went and bought a new external hard drive. Believe me, it is tough to find one without some bullshit backup software pre-installed. From what I've read, they all suck.

But I did find one: a Western Digital "Elements" drive. It had literally NOTHING on it when I installed it. Just what I wanted!