.AVI file plays to a point, but can't be copied (USB hard drive)

Question

I have an .avi file (DVD encoded to MPEG4/DIVX ACS) that has a problem - or maybe it's the disk. The file is on a hard drive that I am accessing via a USB adapter. I can't copy the file to my local drive - the copy freezes at around 97%, and I have to unplug the USB cable to cancel the process.

I can play the .avi file until around 2:13:20 (it's 2:21:40 in length), and then VLC Media Player (1.0.5) freezes (I have to unplug the USB cable to kill VLC). If I skip past the 2:13:20 part, the movie plays fine to the end.

I used Simple File Splitter to cut the file into 3 pieces - it froze at around 97%, but it saved the data from as far as it got - 2:10:40 of the movie. If I play that file in VLC, VLC asks to rebuild the index, which after 2 minutes stops at 98%, and after another minute of nothing I canceled it. I re-ran VLC without repairing the file, and it played to 2:10:40 before hanging (you can't seek - bad index - so I fast-forwarded at 32x to near the end.)

What is the problem? The file, the hard drive? I ran chkdsk, and it reports no errors.

Since I can skip past the bad part and keep playing the movie, there must be a way to recover most of it. I found a couple .avi fixer utilitites, but they require a file that can be read... and the USB/hard drive is freezing on the bad part.

This hard drive doesn't fit in my laptop, and it has no O/S on it. The other files on it, larger and smaller, copy to my local disk fine.

The orginal .avi file is around 940MB. The O/S is Windows XP SP3. 1GB RAM, 1.6gHz Intel Centrino.