USB drive I/O errors

Hi,

I wonder if anyone here can help. I have a 2 year old Smartdrive Crossfire 160 GB external USB drive. A little while ago it started acting up and sometimes giving an error when I tried to read a file. After a reboot this went away.

In the last few days I now have problems trying to write to it. Some things work OK but when I'm trying to copy larger (5MB) files I get a an error message saying that there is an "Operation could not be completed because of an I/O device error".

I have tried surface scans with a couple of tools. HDDScan showed only 1 >500ms block and 1 bad block. The other scan I did said everything was OK. So I'm thinking that the disk is probably OK but there's another problem in my setup.

Any clues - I've tried searching everywhere but not come up with any answers yet. I don't want to have to buy another drive if that's not the problem as money is a bit tight at the moment.

Thanks

D.

If disk has bad blocks - this is a bad disk and cannot be OK !

OK - thanks. I hadn't realised. One bad block and its all over? New disk is the only option?

Thanks
D.

Hi,

try zero-filling the whole drive (backup your data first

)

pepe

OK - thanks very much for the suggestion. If I have to go that far, would reformatting as NTFS (it is FAT32 at present) do the same/similar job?

If not, what is the best tool to 0 fill? I used HDDScan for the scan but notice a lot of references to MHDD here - does that have this facility?

Thanks for patience with the newb questions. Have always been lucky before with HDs I guess - never had problems.

D.

Just remap that bad sector with victoria .

Did a full scan using Victoria. Results were:-

Warnings 5598
Errors 4.

This is for a 160 GB disk.

Did a re-scan immediately of one of the blocks logged as in error and it's fine (<5ms and then <20ms).

Does this potentially point to some other sort of problem?

I have bought a new USB cable to try but won't know results of full scan for several hours.

Thanks

D.

I think this means ur hdd is ok and ready to be used i dont see any problem now .

The scan was OK for verify and read (some orange sectors but no bads). However, a write test was a different matter. 60+ bad sectors.

I decided to try and use the Hitachi diagnostics (DFT) so took the drive out of its USB enclosure and installed it in someone else's PC. Unfortunately they didn't have a floppy drive for me to create the DFT boot disk.

I spend several hours trying to create a bootable USB key but with no luck. I did manage to see an error report (looked like SMART type thing) during boot-up on that PC. Tried digging a but more using Dell diags and HDDHealth but they both showed no problems on teh disk.

Anyway the drive was still giving real problems when I tried to write to it (I guess this is a better failure than reading!!) so I had at least eliminated the USB enclosure and PC configuration.

At this point I gave up and went and bought a new disc which I have put in the old enclosure and is formatting as I write.

Thanks for the help and points all. At least I learned quite a lot along the way even if it was very time-consuming.

D.

But what about the bootable CD ISO-Image of DFT? Wouldn't that have been the easier way?
Doesn't seem to matter now anyway.

Regards,
weaker