Data gets corrupted when moved to external USB drive

T

ThomasAnderson

Geek Trainee
Hi,

I have got a 80 GB laptop hard drive which I use as an external storage through USB enclosure.

For the first few month, it worked smoothly. But now for the last few weeks I am observing that whatever I copy to it, it gets a little corrupted.

Zip archives, as long as they are on my internal drive they are fine. But when I moved them to my external drive and test them, it shows that some portions are corrupted.

Videos work fine when they are on my internal drive but when moved to the external one, they start showing jitters.

Iso images, I checksum them when on my internal drive, the result is ok but when moved to the same external drive, the checksum always fails.


This problem is with only that particular laptop hard drive converted into an external drive.

I have checked this with other USB drives, flash memories, memory cards and they all work fine.

At first, I thought that the problem is with the hard drive. I scanned it for bad sectors and other errors several times but each time I got that hard disk is ok. Sometimes I did get errors and they were fixed by the software but that didn't solve my above mentioned problem.

Now, my question to you gurus is that what is causing this corruption of data?
Is it because of my USB enclosure?

Any help will be highly appreciated.
Regards
 
Welcome to HWF :)

There are three possibilities that could cause this.

1) Partition damaged. Take a note of the drive letter that is assigned to the external drive (for example F: ), Go to Command Prompt (Start > Programs > Accessoiries > Command Prompt). Enter the command chkdsk X: /f, where X: is the letter of the drive.
(I know you tried to check for bad sectors, but try it again with the above command)

2) Broken USB Cable. Try a different USB cable.

3) Circuit board of the drive has an issue. Open the enclosure and make sure that the drive is correctly seated. If so, you might need to get a new enclosure.
 
RHochstenbach said:
Welcome to HWF :)
Click to expand...
Thanks!


RHochstenbach said:
1) Partition damaged. Take a note of the drive letter that is assigned to the external drive (for example F: ), Go to Command Prompt (Start > Programs > Accessoiries > Command Prompt). Enter the command chkdsk X: /f, where X: is the letter of the drive.
(I know you tried to check for bad sectors, but try it again with the above command)

2) Broken USB Cable. Try a different USB cable.

3) Circuit board of the drive has an issue. Open the enclosure and make sure that the drive is correctly seated. If so, you might need to get a new enclosure.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the tips. I will try each one of them.
 
RHochstenbach said:
Welcome to HWF :)

1) Partition damaged. Take a note of the drive letter that is assigned to the external drive (for example F: ), Go to Command Prompt (Start > Programs > Accessoiries > Command Prompt). Enter the command chkdsk X: /f, where X: is the letter of the drive.
(I know you tried to check for bad sectors, but try it again with the above command)

2) Broken USB Cable. Try a different USB cable.

3) Circuit board of the drive has an issue. Open the enclosure and make sure that the drive is correctly seated. If so, you might need to get a new enclosure.
Click to expand...

I tested my drive with GNU/Linux command badblocks and found several bad sectors.

Is it possible that badblocks returned so many bad sectors because of some problem with USB enclosure?
I mean that usb cable or usb enclosure is busted which is why bad sectors couldn't scan the disk properly, resulting in bad sectors' result. Is it possible?
 
Are you able to use this utility to repair the bad sectors (don't know much about Linux)? If it can't repair the bad sectors, then it might indeed be caused by the enclosure.
 
Use one of the programs which return SMART reports.

You will probably find the Reallocated Sectors Count has reached its limit.
 
Hi,

Well I found out that problem was basically with the usb enclosure.

I scanned my drive using GNU/Linux tool badblocks

$ badblocks -n -s -v -c 10240 -o list /dev/sdb1
Click to expand...
When I read the output file, all the bad blocks were consecutive numbers, starting from the lowest to the highest. If that was true then my whole drive would be totally gone. But I was able to access all the file, with only little bit corruption.

So I decided to try a new enclosure first. And it worked! Now my drive is working fine and my files aren't showing corruption any more.

Thanks RHochstenbach and zeus for helping me.
 
1) Partition damaged. Take a note of the drive letter that is assigned to the external drive (for example F: ), Go to Command Prompt (Start > Programs > Accessoiries > Command Prompt). Enter the command chkdsk X: /f, where X: is the letter of the drive.
(I know you tried to check for bad sectors, but try it again with the above command)

2) Broken USB Cable. Try a different USB cable.

3) Circuit board of the drive has an issue. Open the enclosure and make sure that the drive is correctly seated. If so, you might need to get a new enclosure.

I can more give solutions to you.
 
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