Windows 10: Copies of folders and drives appearing in file explorer after using external hard drive.

I have what appear to be more than one hard drive listed in the file explorer on my windows 10 computer as well as multiple copies of other folders such as documents, music, pictures, etc.

This has happened after using an external hard drive more than one to back up my computer.

Can you tell me how to remove them and how to prevent this from happening again?

After reading many older posts I see this has been an issue for several years both for cloud backup and plug in external hard drives.

Maybe microsoft could come up with a fix?

:)

 

External Hard Drive

Hi John,

We suggest that you try the troubleshooting steps below:

• Open your External Hard Drive file in File Explorer.
• Type the name of the file you want to search on the search box and click Enter.

The file will show up in Search Results and you will be able to move it to the correct folder.

Let us know if you need further help.

 

files on external hard drive

Hi ironfighter

Greetings! I am Vijay, an Independent Advisor. You should use File Explorer to copy the photos from external hard drive and pasting into Windows.

When you attach external hard drive to Windows computer, external hard drive will appear under This PC. Open external hard drive. Navigate to folder where the required pictures are. Select them > CTRL+C and go to the destination folder in File Explorer and
CTRL+V to paste them.

To make them appear in Photos app > Open Photos app > Click 3 dots on top > Settings > Add a folder, if the destination folder is not part of Photos app here (If it is part of Photos app, then pictures will appear in Photos app)

 

unable to copy files to and from external hard drives

Troubleshooter did not fix the problem.

To be more in depth about problem.

I have 2 external hard drives connected thru a USB bus and 2 internal hard drives. I am running windows 10. When I try to copy files, folders, etc (using windows explorer) from the internal drives to the external drives, or even from the external drives
to each other, the system just hangs for about 5 seconds, the screen goes black, comes back to the desktop (which is blank of icons) and then starts to set all of the icons on the desktop.

Windows explorer is closed and the function is not completed. At no point does an error message appear. I am listed as an administrator for the system, I have made sure that all permissions are set to full, and all of the drives are fully shared.

I did go into safe mode function for windows 10 and there were not problems copying files and folders back and forth; but when I re-booted back into full windows, the problem "re-appeared"

Thanx,

Mac