External Hard drive failing?

[ShinobiGiri]

This morning my brother threw me some shocking news that the external hard drive was freezing up the computer and wouldn't load up. So i thought to bring the external to my laptop and do some diagnostics of error checking and bad sectors. After a few minutes windows would stop and say that it couldn't perform the operation.

After a few minutes of browsing the drive and trying to free up some space i would get an error saying "Delay Write Failed" and that it could not save this file e:\$msft i believe. I can open up some files without a problem but deleting and cleaning up the hard drive seems to be a problem and it just fails to work anymore and the drive appears blank.

[rjfvillarosa]

What make/model of drive is it?
Firewire or USB?
How old is it?

[ShinobiGiri]

It's a Seagate 150GB
I've had it for about a year
And we use USB.

Also just incase im running Windows XP SP2

[rjfvillarosa]

Have you atempted diagnosis yet using Seagates harddrive diagnostic tool available from Seagates website?

[ShinobiGiri]

not quite yet. I will do that now. Also this kinda goes in hand with the freezing of USB devices of my computer in the living room. It seems any USB device i plug in and turn on freezes the PC to a halt. The PC is about....a good 5-6 years old the mother board rather is that old as it hasn't really be changed in that long. It's also running windows xp sp2

[rjfvillarosa]

Maybe we should try investigating your USB problem and maybe you can test that external drive on another machine.

[ShinobiGiri]

I'm doing that at the moment im running the seagate diagnostic with my laptop and its finding a lot of unreadable sectors.

Now the USB problem just happened recently...it was working perfectly fine Monday but Tuesday morning it just went kaput.

The last activity done on it was my brother was downloading Ragnarok Online files directly to the drive and left it on overnight. And the next morning he tried opening the file and it just froze on him.

[rjfvillarosa]

Where do you live?
What is the weather like (any electrical storms)?
What is your electrical supply like?
Did you have any problems with the drive or USB before the overnight download?
Any chance it could be a virus?

[ShinobiGiri]

I live in new york city
The weather here is pretty mild and hot (60 - 85 degree weather)
My electrical supply is an 8 port surge protector
It was working fine that night
and there may be a chance of a virus as AVG has picked one up a few times and put it in the virus vault but i would clean them out.

[rjfvillarosa]

How are the diagnostics going and can you access the drive from your laptop now?

[ShinobiGiri]

Oddly enough seagate diagnostics still don't want to go through yet, as it says that it had encountered 20 bad sectors and would just quit the scanning. So at the moment i'm running windows error-checking. Before when i ran either option of error checking it would not go through. But thanks to the chkdsk it had repaired some lost files and allocated them to a folder called "found.000" also the external hard drive is a bit faster than it had been before.

Before it was nothing but a slow crawl and right clicking a folder and asking for the properties literally took 3-4 minutes to show up. So after i'm done with the error-checking i'll run the seagate utilities.

Also i'm performing all these scans from the laptop. The PC is still acting kinda funny. Maybe i should reinstall the USB drivers. Also the USB ports are 1.1

[rjfvillarosa]

How are the Seagate diagnostics going now?
Does that old machine freeze up with any USB device or just the external harddrive?

[ShinobiGiri]

The seagate diagnostics won't go anywhere due to those bad sector errors. I've tried fixing them with windows error-checking but no dice. I also really don't have a place to back up all the data.

And yeah, it freezes on any USB device. MP3 players, PSP, thumbdrives.

Btw thanks for being patient with me on this i appreciate it.

[rjfvillarosa]

Does your laptop have USB 2.0 or 1.1?

[glc]

You either have a bad hard drive or a bad interface board in your housing. The only way to positively sort it is remove the drive from the housing and install it on the IDE in a computer and run the diags.

[rjfvillarosa]

glc I was quietly on my way to suggesting connecting the harddrive via IDE, but I thought I read somewhere about someone doing that and then having problems after reinstalling the harddrive in the external enclosure.

[ShinobiGiri]

the USB has 2 2.0 USB ports

[rjfvillarosa]

USB might be a little slow to get good readings on that drive, do you feel comfortable pulling the external case apart and connecting the harddrive direct via the internal IDE cable in your old machine?

[ShinobiGiri]

yeah i think i am. It won't do any damage so yeah i think i can pull that off.

[rjfvillarosa]

Before you start pulling that drive apart I want to check with GLC, Panama Red and anyone else who want's to chip in, concerning the possibilty of not being able to use the HDD back in the enclosure afterwards.
I am certain I read somewhere about someone having problems with the HDD after doing this.

[glc]

I swap drives in and out of my housing constantly.

[rjfvillarosa]

Considering glc's last post I would go ahead and remove the harddrive from the enclosure and slave it to your tower, that way you might be able to conduct the diagnostic test's a little easier and quicker.




I am determined to find where it was that I read about someone having problems after doing this, I am not crazy and I don't hear voices honestly.