Advice needed for Problem HDD.

[sheeny (Al)]

I have an 80GB Removable HDD that I use to transfer stuff between work and home. Today I was offered a copy of the doco on Stephen Hawking, so a mate at work copied it onto my HDD. Then he disconnected it, and immediately said "Oh sorry, I didn't park your HDD".

After much mucking about at home I now have the drive recognised on the system... for a long while it wasn't recognised as a drive, then was but could not find the volume label or any files, etc.

At the moment its seeing the volume label and all the files, but the system is really slow. The LED on the HDD shows it is communicating with the PC quite a lot and tying up the PC. I have tried to copy files from the drive, but it is so slow, I've given up on that for now. Explorer ends up "not responding" before it manages to copy any files.

At the moment I'm running checkdisk on it, hoping this will find and fix some of the problems that are slowing it down. Its about 25% through phase 1 and that's taken a good hour so far .

Anyone have any good advice about any other things I should be doing to get my data off this drive?

Thanks,

Al.

[h0ughy (David)]

SOunds like the FAT table is really damaged. You could have the drive connected and boot up on one of the linux programs on CD so you can look at the HDD contents.

[sheeny (Al)]

Thanks hOughy. I'm not Linux literate, but I know a son of mine who is! He's studying IT... if checkdisk doesn't fix it, I'll see what he can do.

Al.

[cjmarsh81]

Hard Drives auto-park themselves when they spin down. If he did not "safely remove" it with the little icon in the taskbar then you may have some data loss. The only reason you need to "safely remove" the hard disk device is because Windows uses write caching on the disk, meaning the data could still be in ram and not actually written to the disk when you disconnect it.

If he did not "safely remove device" then the only problem I thought you would have had would be the actual Stephen Hawking file would be corrupt or missing. I don't see how it could have damaged your drive the way it has. I would be thinking there is a hardware issue rather than software issue.

P.S. I would not recommend using external hard disks for transfering critical data at any time. Hard disks are not designed to be portable.

P.P.S. Try a different USB cable. I have found my external hard disk to be extremely temperamental.

[sheeny (Al)]

Hmmm. I had a feeling the HDD should park itself as it spun down, so I wasn't too worried about it, but to be honest I am pretty vague about it. IT stuff isn't my primary interest, it's just a means to an end, so I often learn little bits and then they dwindle into vagueness...

Hopefully its just coincidence playing silly buggers with me. I've read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy... I know how that works!

Woo hoo! It's up to phase 4! (I hope it keeps going...)

Al.

[iceman (Mike)]

I've got a 300gig external HDD that I store important stuff on. I know I should definitely start backing that stuff up to DVD!

[sheeny (Al)]

Success at last! ...or is it for the time being?

Just to fill you in on what's happened in case someone else has a similar problem...

Checkdisk made no progress through phase 4 at all. Eventually, it gave up and told me the checkdisk could not be completed. So I removed the HDD from the system and reconnected with a different USB cable. Viola!

I am in the process if dragging all the new data on there (Stephen Hawking doco, etc) off it just in case! It seems to be behaving itself nicely... time will tell!

Hopefully it's just a suspect cable!

Thanks very much for your help guys! It has helped to keep my language away from the short wavelength end of the spectrum!

Al.

[vindictive666 (John)]

i my little opinion these brilliant and big hard drives are good but its allso a good potential to lose a lot of data and precious stuff IF YOU DONT back up Frequently ive been there and done it

ive only got an 120gb hdd but with the talk of 300gb and terra's ouch it seems to be a cheap outlay of around $15 Aus For 10 x4.7 gb blank disks for backups

essecially if youre 300gb (or whatever size) is near on full

just my 2 cents (ive lost a lot of stuff cuz of the good ole windoze playing up and so forth ) (one instance it corrupted (windoze xp) all the data on the hdd so now i split the os from the data C= the os And D= for all the data so if the os chucks it i should at least get some of my data back (crosses fingers here). )

so as ive allways have been told backup backup blah blah blah

[cjmarsh81]

I have had the same problem with the USB cable. I don't think it is actually faulty, it just can't handle the high data rate. I find that Firewire works better if you have that option. Great to hear to didn't lose your data(know what that feels like).

[sheeny (Al)]

Yes I have been caught before!

Fortunately most of the stuff on that drives was also elsewhere, so the only stuff I was likely to lose would've been the hawking doco I think. But my previous losses have conditioned me! Even though I knew I would lose very little I still had that sick in the stomach feeling! Damn Pavlov... and his dog!

Al.