My External Needs Help

-zero- · #1 11-01-2007, 08:02 PM

I purchased a Western Digital My Book Pro external hard drive in August. In the past month I've been getting some fairly common errors when trying to download things onto the drive, and occasionally when I reboot that blue screen scan disc shows up for it. I let it run once and the drive worked fine for a bit but now its messed up again so I don't think running the scan disk again will be very helpful.

Should I contact WD or is this just something I can fix with some diagnostic program? If the latter, can someone please recommend something? Thanks.

erbbysam · #2 11-01-2007, 08:15 PM

Have you tried defragmenting the drive recently, usually works pretty well.
(if defraging doesn't work)Could also be some sort of drive related problem which could be fixed by spinrite: http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

If that doesn't work then there's something else wrong with the drive that only WD could fix.

EDIT: congrats on 5K posts

-zero- · #3 11-02-2007, 02:16 PM

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't really want to pay for a $90 program to fix a $200 drive that is still under warranty. I just ended up calling Western Digital and they are shipping me a brand new one no questions asked and I need to send the defective one back after. Only [censored] thing is that I have to pay the shipping to send it to them.

Before I called them I gave the Scan Disk one more time. The drive still creates errors when I try and download to it, and now when I try and access the drive a window pops up and says that it's not formatted and asking me if I want to do it now. If I do this, I'll lose all the data on the drive right? I have about 100GB on there. Is there some way I can save the stuff thats on there?

Freakin · #4 11-02-2007, 02:43 PM

Do you get the "delayed write failed" errors?

-zero- · #5 11-02-2007, 02:57 PM

No, when I was downloading with utorrent I would get "cyclic redundancy error" or something similar and now I'm using Free Download Manager and I'm just getting "unknown error."

CORed · #6 11-02-2007, 03:07 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't really want to pay for a $90 program to fix a $200 drive that is still under warranty. I just ended up calling Western Digital and they are shipping me a brand new one no questions asked and I need to send the defective one back after. Only [censored] thing is that I have to pay the shipping to send it to them.

Before I called them I gave the Scan Disk one more time. The drive still creates errors when I try and download to it, and now when I try and access the drive a window pops up and says that it's not formatted and asking me if I want to do it now. If I do this, I'll lose all the data on the drive right? I have about 100GB on there. Is there some way I can save the stuff thats on there?

[/ QUOTE ]

If you reformat it, you will definitely lose the data. However, if it's now telling you that the drive is unformatted, it's likely that you have already lost the data, unless you want to pay $$$$ to a data recovery company.

LeapFrog · #7 11-02-2007, 03:12 PM

[ QUOTE ]
No, when I was downloading with AHEM, *cough* I would get "cyclic redundancy error" or something similar and now I'm using Free Download Manager and I'm just getting "unknown error."

[/ QUOTE ]

food for thought: you might want to format the drive then use something like Eraser to wipe the free space before you send it back. Don't know how effective it would be given the probable hardware issues but something you may consider if there is anything on the drive you would not like potentially associated with yourself. Obviously make sure you get any data off that you want before beginning this.

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/

-zero- · #8 11-02-2007, 03:17 PM

Ya, there was nothing on there important enough to pay someone for recovery, so I guess I'll just consider it lost. And as far as sensitive info, I think the only stuff I had on there like that was a backup Keepass database and my poker databases. Since that Eraser program is free I'll definitely wipe the drive before sending it back. Thanks for the help guys.

UbinTook · #9 11-04-2007, 03:53 PM

Ive had great success with http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
i have actually pulled data from a drive that was formatted twice.

-zero- · #10 11-06-2007, 12:07 PM

[ QUOTE ]
Ive had great success with http://www.recovermyfiles.com/
i have actually pulled data from a drive that was formatted twice.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks. I tried this program and after a 14 hour scan I think it recovered pretty much everything. I'm in the process of saving it all now and that looks like its going to take several more hours.