External Hard Drive Issues

[CuNaMo]

Hello,

I am not sure if this problem belongs in this section or in the OS section, because I have a suspicion that the problem isn't with the hardware, but with the windows XP. Anyway, please let me know if I need to move it.

First, I have an external hardrive that is a 1TB buffalo combostation 4, that I have been using for more than 6 months just fine. I have about 500GB of data backed up onto the drive at the moment, several gigs of which is irreplaceable. Unfortunately, within the past month I have started to have some serious problems. First, the drive started freezing up. I would simply be navigating trough the folders/files, not even opening anything, and sometime between 2 minutes and 10 minutes it would freeze, and explorer would freeze and I couldn't terminate any processes in task manager. The only way to solve the problem was to unplug or turn off the drive, after which my computer would function again and I would get an error saying something like "the $MFT was inaccessible or corrupted and could not be written to." This error was most common when the drive was plugged in with a firewire cable (it has multiple different plugs in the back of the casing).

Recently, I plugged it into my computer with the included USB cable and it seemed to work a lot better for about an hour until the system tray started giving different errors about $MFT, saying "_____ file is corrupt" or something like that. When I opened the drive all of the folders were still there and I could open them, but they were all empty and properties said that there was nothing in any of the folders. I turned it off and then back on and plugged it in again and this time it showed up as a "removable drive" instead of the name of the drive and in the properties it said that the used space AND the free space was 0kb.

Now my internet research and questioning on the matter up to this point has all pointed me to believe that my HDD is bricked and is useless, HOWEVER immediately after the above problem occurred (the 0kb space error) I plugged my external hard drive into a laptop and IT WORKED PERFECTLY. I only navigated/opened files for about 20 minutes, but it was working.

Finally, let me explain why I think it might be my OS. Shortly after the first issues with my external drive occurred my PC started to act up also. Sometimes while navigating through my HDD explorer.exe would freeze and then close and then reopen, also, when I restart or turn on my PC explorer.exe seems to be frozen for several minutes before responding. I say "seems" because I can see that it is running in task manager, but there is no desktop or shortcuts or start menu, etc.

Please help me! Is it possible that the problem is with my external hard drive after all? And if that is the case how can I fix it without losing all of my data? Or, is my OS really to blame? And how do I fix that?

[truenorth]

When you transfer the HDD to the "laptop" are all the files on it as they should be? If so as an immediate measure until other issues are resolved (if the files that are "irreplaceable" are viewable) i urge you to transfer them to a cd or dvd burnable disc. They may not be as convenient as on the external HDD but at least they are permanently saved regardless of what eventually happens with the removable HDD.
  Now when you remove/stop the external from the PC (where you are having the problem) how are you doing that? Are you shutting it down via the "safely remove hardware" protocol? If not that has been known to render the data on the device flashdrive/hdd/ to be irretrievably lost or corrupted (personal experience speaking here). The external HDD; is it partitioned or is it all one honkin HDD? truenorth

[Computer_Commando]

Which interface are you using?

[soybean]

I have about 500GB of data backed up onto the drive at the moment, several gigs of which is irreplaceable.

I think my first order of business in this situation would be to burn those irreplaceable files to DVD, using the laptop.

[Accessless]

Mean while run SeaTools on you desktops internal HDD to make sure that the error wasn't from your OS HDD.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=seatools-win-eula&vgnextoid=d0d51d4dad651110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD

[CuNaMo]

Hello all,

Sorry for not responding right away. I set the thread to notify me if any one posted on my topic and I only just got ONE notification today despite having three replies!

Thank you for the advice about backing up my irreplaceable data on dvd, I will do that right away.

@computer_commando
On my PC I normally used the firewire port (second down from the top in your photo) but I also tried the USB port (second up from the bottom) and neither worked. I don't have an external esata port on my PC, only internal. When I plugged the drive into the laptop I used the usb port.

@Truenorth
Thank you, I will back up my personal data right away. As far as disconnecting the drive I have always used the "safely remove hardware" function before I had this problem with the drive. More recently, it completely freezes explorer and the only way to stop it is to either unplug the usb/firewire or to turn off the external drive with the butterfly switch on the back, so using the proper function is impossible. I have turned it off this way several times due to multiple failed attempts to troubleshoot and fix the problem. However, I think I have only shutdown my external drive this way maybe two times while I was using any files on it (playing music/video,etc.). Since this problem emerged I have been careful to not open any files except for testing purposes and then I close them after a few minutes. The drive usually freezes and needs to be shutdown wile I am simply navigating through the folders.

@Accessless
I will run seatools on my internal HDD right away and report back with the results.

Thank you all for your help I will start working on it right now, please check back and continue to give me great advice! Thank you.

[CuNaMo]

Update for Accessless:

Ok so I downloaded and ran seatools and it couldn't run. When it first opened it had a small window that said: "scanning for supported drives"

Then my computer made that windows error sound and another window opened up. This window was titled: "fatal error: device discovery" and in the window it said:

value cannot be null.
parameter name: value int32 indexof(system.string, int32, int32, system.stringcomparison)

And the only option was to hit the "ok" button at the bottom of the window and seatools closed. Basically I think this is saying that I don't have a hard drive? I went into device manager and I discovered something wierd. My hard drive is labeled as an "unknown device."

I can look at the properties of it and it says it is called "ST31000340AS" but it is not in device manager as a disk drive or storage volume. I know that "ST31000340AS" is the name of my hard drive which is a 1TB seagate barracuda. I went on the seagate website to download firmware for my drive and apparently there is none (or I just really suck at finding it). So does this mean that the problem IS with my internal HDD? Or is this just another separate problem (like I need more of those)?

Please let me know what you think, and thank you for all your help!

[Computer_Commando]

Let's try SeaTools for DOS; download the iso file and "burn image to disk".  Then boot to the SeaTools CD; run Short Test, Long Test.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=seatooldreg&vgnextoid=480bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

[CuNaMo]

Hey Computer_Commando,

So I ran the DOS seatools from boot and my HDD passed the short test, but I think the long test didn't finish. It was at about 56% (which took about 40 minutes to get there) and I left the computer for ten minutes and when I came back there was a green box on the screen with text on it that said "thank you for using seatools, eject the CD and hit ctrl+alt+delete to restart computer." So I am not sure if I passed or not. By the way, I probably should have mentioned that my internal HDD is partitioned, would this negatively affect these tests?

Also, I did some more testing on my external hard drive and I think there is definitely a problem with it now. I borrowed my dad's laptop for awhile and I backed up my irreplaceable data and then I decided to do a "time test" so to speak. Before I had problems with my external hard drive I used to watch movies and listen to music off of it for hours at a time, so after I backed up the most important data I started watching a movie. The movie ran fine for about 45 minutes until it started to skip. I closed it and began searching through the drive opening different files to see if they were corrupted and then after about 5 minutes an error popped up from the system tray saying "E:\$MFT could not be read, the data has been lost... etc. etc." When this happened the laptop still worked just fine and explorer was still running and I could even navigate through the folders on my external drive, which is different from what usually happens on my PC. Normally everything just freezes up, but that didn't happen. What did happen was that all of the actual data inside of the folders was gone! For instance, when I opened a folder for one of my CDs that I backed up to MP3 it was be empty! I went back to the folder of the movie I was watching 5 minutes earlier and the movie was gone! So, I disconnected, unplugged, and turned off the drive and then turned it back on and plugged it back in and then all of my data was back again! So maybe my MFT is corrupted? Let me know what you think, and thanks again for your help.

[Computer_Commando]

Partitioned hard drive should have no effect on the test.  I've seen the test do the same thing, it seems to stall and then all of a sudden, it's done.  If it found errors, it would say so.

You could try testing the Buffalo's hard drive, but you will have to use the eSATA interface or remove it from its enclosure & connect it to your desktop motherboard (if your motherboard has SATA).  Some motherboards support booting from a USB drive which would allow SeaTools-DOS to test it, but a 1TB drive on USB could take 24 hrs or more to test.  SeaTools will test many other brands besides Seagate.