It's a enclosure from Gigaware, I checked the online reviews and it
doesn't seem to be problematic, had a front panel activity light,
(broke, it and it was my fault), and wonder of wonders a rocker switch
for to turn it on and off.
It's an IDE drive and my desktop has IDE connectors but I'm loath to
tear it apart to see if DataLifeGaurd will recognize the drive if it's
directly connected to the motherboard without a USB interface in
between, that is unless I were sure that it would work. I've got this
system working mostly the way I want it to and don't want to screw that up.
<rant>The fact that Seatools which is a propitiatory version of Acronis'
software recognizes the Western Digital drive and returns both it's
model number and it's serial number, points to it being a limitation in
the WD software, but still DLG should recognize that the drive is a WD
drive and at least test it, it tested and passed all the other USB
drives and none of them are Western Digital products.<rant>
Well right now I've got checkdisk running in the background on the
drive, it seems to have gotten past the 2/3 mark running overnight. I
hope it will generate a meaningful report. So far it seems that the
only things that were actually lost were a few large archives of free
software that I didn't bother to back up, since I figured I could always
download them again. I never used any of it IIRC, so I'm not that
worried. It did seem to have a large number of bad sectors in the
middle of where my pef's were stored but I have multiple copies of them
so that's not a problem.
I'd like to thank everyone who responded, everyone's advice was welcome.
On 7/10/2013 9:27 AM, John wrote:
You mentioned it's in a USB enclosure. Have you tried mounting it in a
different USB enclosure. There's a small chance it's not the drive
itself.
I don't know if it's one of those WD MyBook drives - you did say it was
a PRETTY SOLID enclosure & in my opinion those WD MyBook drives are
anything but. My experience with them is they have VERY flimsy power
supplies & sometimes what appears as a drive problem is actually a power
supply problem
On 7/10/2013 1:04 AM, P.J. Alling wrote:
I can access the drive readily enough from the command line. The backup
is still underway, (the program I'm using is aggressively trying to
recover some unreadable files, nothing irreplaceable I hope), so I'm not
about to attempt to format the drive until that operation completes. I
haven't tried Knoppix that may not be necessary. This machine is
running WinXP (SP3), and I suspect that running the manufactures disk
diagnostic and repair/format utility might do a better job than the
windows format, for blocking out any bad sectors. I'm not sure at this
point that attempting to save the drive is even a good idea, but being a
Yankee, I hate to throw anything that might be useful away, so I'd like
to at least try.
It's odd that Seagate's utility can at see and test the problematic
drive while Western Digital's cannot.
On 7/10/2013 12:35 AM, Paul Sorenson wrote:
Does your computer see the drive from the command line? Can you
format the drive from there using the DOS format command?
If you run Knoppix can your computer see the drive? That's saved my
bacon several times. I think you can do an NTFS format from Knoppix
if you can mount the drive.
-p
On 7/9/2013 5:54 PM, P.J. Alling wrote:
So I have an interesting problem. I have an older PATA/IDE drive
that's
been put into a pretty solid USB case for external backups. It's been
working well, until now, but has just started to evidence read
errors. I
figured no problem I'll run a quick diagnostic and if it's going bad,
back up everything then try to reformat and recover the hardware.
it's a WD drive most of my current drives are Seagate, but Seatools
sees
it and will run generic short and long tests on it. Long story short,
Short test Passed, Long test fails. So I figure I'll download Western
Digital's tool and try that, to see if I can get a better handle on
what's happening. WD's tool cannot see the drive. OK, so I had to
back
it up anyway, that's underway.
Here's the conundrum. Seatools will test the drive but won't do a low
level format on a WD drive. DataLifeGuard doesn't see the drive as
a WD
drive, just as a logical partition and won't run any tests on it, nor
will it low level format a drive it doesn't recognize.
Sure the drive is probably toast, but I'd at least like to try to keep
it alive. I'm looking for suggestions.
I've found several people who've had the same problem with
DataLifeGuard
recognizing only the logical partition of the drive in question,
but no
solutions have been posted, to the forums I've checked. I figured I
check here because this list is always full of surprises.
--
There are two kinds of computer users those who've experienced a hard drive
failure, and those that will.
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
PDML@pdml.net
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
