portable hard drive issue

[freecar]

Hi all,

I've been having a problem recently. I have a load of TV series downloaded onto a hard disk (lacie 320 Gb) and recently it's been playing up. I can't copy the contents off of the drive. The green light has stopped lighting up and videos hang up while watching them. (the amber and orange lights light up during use)

As I cannot copy the contents from the drive if the drive is no longer functional I am stuffed! I have over 220Gb of TV shows on that drive and I don't fancy dowloading them again.

I have tried to do a checkdisk from windows and it cannot. It tells me it needs exclusive access to some windows files and do I want to schedule it for the next restart. I do and it fails on restart as well.

[randlemarcus]

And that's why you need backups

I learned the lesson about external drives a while back with a 1Tb drive that corrupted like that.

You might try using a different PC, or if its a multiple interface drive, using firewire instead of USB.

[marshalla]

Sounds like something in there is about to fail - severely.

Although it's an external drive it will contain a standard IDE or SATA drive internally - my advice would be to start by extracting that and trying it on another USB adapter (you can pick them up for £10 to £20 from any decent electronics/PC shop) and see if the problem goes away.

If it doesn't - then the fault is probably on the drive itself - either the control electronics or the drive platters. Something like SpinRite or PowerMAX (Maxtor utility for SMART capable drives) might be able to get the drive back into a usable state for you - ideally with the drive connected to an internal controller on your PC.

[freecar]

marshalla said:

Sounds like something in there is about to fail - severely.

Although it's an external drive it will contain a standard IDE or SATA drive internally - my advice would be to start by extracting that and trying it on another USB adapter (you can pick them up for £10 to £20 from any decent electronics/PC shop) and see if the problem goes away.

If it doesn't - then the fault is probably on the drive itself - either the control electronics or the drive platters. Something like SpinRite or PowerMAX (Maxtor utility for SMART capable drives) might be able to get the drive back into a usable state for you - ideally with the drive connected to an internal controller on your PC.

Huh?

I have little idea what you are talking about.

I have now removed said drive from enclosure and placed it inside my pc with wires connecting it up but my bios doesn't recognise it at all. My hard drive has a different connection but it is the same as my CD rom so I used the other cable from that.

I removed the "master" jumper from the external drive before putting it in

I don't know what else I can try.

[TheD]

You could try an identical drive and swap over the onboard mobo. Is it a sata drive or Ide. I know you said jumper but if it is ide try it as a slave. Also try putting in as the master and the only one on the cable and start from an xp/linux live cd to see if they see it.

[freecar]

TheD said:

You could try an identical drive and swap over the onboard mobo. Is it a sata drive or Ide. I know you said jumper but if it is ide try it as a slave. Also try putting in as the master and the only one on the cable and start from an xp/linux live cd to see if they see it.

yeah can't be doing that.

Had no disc since I bought the PC as Dell wanted £40 for one.

It is an IDE drive and I have it set as the slave. It doesn't even register in the bios and I'm not throwing money at it to try to sort it out.

Looks like I'm downloading all my stuff again.

[TheD]

Download and make a linux cd. Set the drive as master and plug the cable into it. Start and boot from the cd. If it sees it you can get your stuff off and if it doesn't your fecked

[marshalla]

freecar - you're fked.

[freecar]

it would look that way.

All I wanted to do was buy a 1tb drive and move all my stuff to it but this one had to break before I could do that.

Looks like I'm going to have to buy lots of hard drives to make sure I backup my backups and then backup the backups of backups!

Naively I thought that a hard drive would be quite stable when there is no OS on it and it is just used for storage however it appears that Lacie are quite unreliable.

Is there any reliable hard drive I can use without having to resort to multiple backups??

I don't fancy splashing out on a raid array just to store TV shows and some porn!

[bleesh]

For future use, I'd not got for a 1Tb drive - but a number of smaller ones - split the risk.
I have a few 750Gb drives (nowhere near full) but use them is pairs - if I write to one, I copy the same data to the other as a backup.