Plextor external hard drive

I'm having a problem I've had before and which I went to great lengths to try and fix.

I have a computer with a new mother board and chip, a new dvd burner, and I had my monitor repaired. I reformatted my C drive and reinstalled win XP-Pro, antivirus, firewall, and antimalware programs. I got all the windows updates including SP3 and rebooted a number of times and used the computer with no problems.

My husband then used an external HD by Plextor which has a double usb-cable. He moved photos directly from his camera to the external HD without downloading them onto the computer. The next day I could not boot up and spent the day with my recovery disk, a boot disk and a partition disk in which I learned that the partitions appeared to have been reversed (C & D) (maybe because of the new motherboard?). I kept at this with the various disks, until I finally made some minor change to the BIOS (set the HD to fast detect) and was then able to run a chkdsk. It fixed around 6 files. I was then able to get it into Safe Mode and finally boot up again into normal mode. The comp now always asks to run chkdsk and loops over and over again if I don't skip this procedure. If it runs chkdsk, it reboots afterwards and asks to run chkdsk again.

This is not the first time this has happened. When the problems first occured with this external harddrive, the dvd burner started working sporadically and yesterday, it quit working again for awhile, even though it's a new completely new burner and with a new motherboard.

I wanted to ask if this sounds like a software incompatibility problem or if you've ever heard of some kind of an mbr or rootkit type of virus that could be carried by an external harddrive and cause these kinds of symptoms?

 

REPLY TO Norgate: Plextor External Hard drive (Im sorry in advance)

Ok, I am sorry for doing this. For some reason, I am unable to reply to Norgate's post about the Plextor External Hard Drive.

I have a solution

Could someone please repost the following and moderator: please delete this when this has happened.


Your C volume is "dirty" for whatever reason. Chkdsk will start until it is marked as clean.

Click Start, Run, type cmd, Hit the enter key to bring up a command window.

First type: fsutil dirty query c:
This will tell you if your drive is dirty or not.

Next type: chkntfs /x c:
This will exclude the drive from the check disk

 

I checked to see if the c: drive is clean using the fsutil dirty query c: command and it is clean. Won't the command chkntfs /x c: simply turn off chkdsk? I want chkdsk to work the way it's supposed to.

The looping chkdsk requested at bootup started to occur after a general crash of the computer's ability to boot when a double-usb cable external HD (Plextor) was used. The problem occurred after the ext. harddrive was removed and the computer restarted.

The chkdsk problem began happening when it was finally possible to boot up again.

Could this problem of not being able to boot after using an external harddrive be caused by a rootkit or mbr virus? And would the looping chkdsk problem be caused because of trying to fix the bootup?

Thanks.