It freezes the "My Computer"
Be Careful Here!!
If you are connecting this drive to an incompatible host, you risk losing all that important data, and even the host data!!!!!!.
Some of the recent viruses out there can render a USB drive a source of infection that can ruin all the internal drives of the host system. Also, many folks connect an external USB drive to their cherished host without considering whether the USB drive was formatted in a MAC or PC environment. ie, a MAC host system should be able to read from a PC-formatted USB drive, but if you try to write to that external drive, you will likely lose all the PC-written data on that drive. Often, a PC host will not be able to read or recognize a MAC-formatted USB external drive.
Sometimes the problem is that a PC host will want to have drivers installed for the external drive before it will recognize it. This can be very frustrating if you don't, or never had those drivers. Sometimes, you have to reboot the PC host several times before it will recognize the peripheral device. Some devices will never be recognized by a PC host despite your best efforts.
This is one of the reasons why I changed over to MAC. However, I still often find myself in your situation.
One thing you can try is to download and install the drivers from the manufacturer of the external drive. A lot of this is compatibility issues between your host system and peripheral devices you want to connect, and downloading drivers may not be successful.
Another thing to try is to find a MAC user who will let you connect the external drive to their system. MACs tend to have their OS and most common device drivers resident on their system, so the process may be really seamless. Then, you could burn a CD-R or DVD-R with the files you want from the external drive. That disk should be readable by your PC host system.
Finally, the problem may lie in your external drive. I'll tell you that I have had a lot of external hard drive failures in recent years, and I suspect that is due mostly to the fact that, to keep prices competitive, manufacturers may be using hard drive units in the popular external drive market that are at the low end of the reliability scale. ie, when buying Caviar drives from WD, there are several categories, such as Green, Blue and Black, and they have differing reliability ratings, with differing prices. Enough said, except to say that, if you're buying an external drive to use in a reliability function, don't cheap out; spend the extra money.
Please feel free to contact me if you still have problems.