Muzman on 28/1/2009 at 14:36
Yes that's one hell of a headline isn't it. No jokes please. Let's just say that whoever fixes this can have the pick of the litter once my drive is back a-siring.
It goes like this: I've got an external drive enclosure plugged in via USB 2 in Win XP. It a bit old these days and recently when I turn it on, it seems to work ok but not a lot happens.
The external device thingy comes up in the corner ok and the drive shows up in device manager. But Explorer won't recognise it and I can't view it and it just sits there.
Sometimes I can kick it off by looking at the drive information in computer management. Then it all springs to life; it shows up in explorer, autorun leaps onto the screen etc and is fine. But doing this only works half the time. As often as not drive information denies its existence (despite what device manager says).
When it's readable and working ok the drive is fine; writes ok, reads ok. unplugging and replugging the drive (hot or not) doesn't produce any consistent effect. Neither does turning it off and on again.
I've deleted the USB drivers and reinstalled them to no obvious effect.
Any ideas? Something weird with XP? Or is my enclosure dying?
RavynousHunter on 29/1/2009 at 01:25
If I remember correctly, you can press the Windows key and hold it for a few seconds, it'll force it to detect and activate the drive. My dad happened upon this while trying to get his 2GB thumbdrive to work; his computer is a bit... fickle, and this seems to do the trick nicely.
Muzman on 1/2/2009 at 05:37
Hmm cheers, but it doesn't seem to make any difference. When am I supposed to press it?
There's another thing too: after the initial grind when I switch it on it makes a regular pulsing read noise sort of 'chug' about once a second for over a minute.
I don't know if that has anything to do with anything.
RavynousHunter on 1/2/2009 at 06:53
Occasional reading... Probably means that the computer is at least trying to access it. I dunno, I never really used external enclosures; just thumbdrives.
As for the Windows key thing, if I recall correctly, you just do it while you're at the desktop. /shrug
Al_B on 1/2/2009 at 18:35
It sounds to me as if your hard drive inside the enclosure is on the way out. I would definitely recommend getting a copy of everything on it as soon as possible.
I suspect that the reason it shows up in the device manager is because it's able to see the USB <> EIDE interface itself but the drive itself has problems. From what you've posted I would suspect that the boot and partition sectors are on their way out which is why it is struggling to enumerate itself. Once up and running the partition sector isn't needed to access the rest of the drive so it works fine.
Of course, this is just a theory. Once you've got the drive operating and done a backup do a error check on the hard drive but make sure you specify bad sector checking too.
Muzman on 3/2/2009 at 01:28
Following that advice I backed everything up I could. Just as I was finishing (backing up actual work at the time, rather than general junk) the file system crapped itself and decided the whole thing was corrupted (the work folder was fine). A full scan fixed it up ok, or rather put it back the way it was. I guess I'd better not put anything too precious on there.
No dead spots turned up on the scan that I could see. Could a full format fix it up or would that just fool me into thinking it's alright (if it works)?
Al_B on 3/2/2009 at 19:21
Personally I wouldn't risk it. I've seen hard drives slowly detereorate - particularly where physical damage has been involved. Depending on the enclosure you may be able to replace the hard drive inside and it won't cost too much.
Muzman on 19/5/2009 at 08:18
Interesting addendum to this story:
I copied off what I could and eventually bought a new drive to go in the enclosure. It formatted fine and I copied everything back on again (plus a whole lot of new stuff, since the drive is much bigger) and all was good. A couple of days later, same thing starts happening; drive won't mount or can't be read. The last thing that happened was it mounted and I could browse it, but I kept getting little exclamation point messages from windows saying "could not write *such and such* to F:\" (this was just while browsing, I had not attempted to write anything new to it at that point. So it was some Windows internal palaver). I turned it off and turned it back on a bit later and then "The drive is corrupted and unreadable".
Anyway: new enclosure!
The new drive is still corrupted and unreadable (but I know the new enclosure works because the
old drive now works fine).
I just know this is one of those things where, if I had stopped trying to make it work just a few attempts sooner and gone straight to getting a new enclosure, none of this would have happened.
But here we are. So does anyone know how to read a drive windows says is corrupted and unreadable?
update: I found an OpSrc program called (
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) TestDisk which scanned the drive and then rewrote the boot sector and partition information. I'm not actually sure this did anything as the program said they were fine to begin with and I still couldn't access the drive afterwards. But I could see that there was data on the drive and a (very quick) check disk seems to have put it back to normal.
