weird harddrive error

S

sid

Geek Trainee
hey
i've been trying to solve this problem for over a month now..
i have a seasgate 200gb IDE harddrive which i use in an external case..
its formatted as a single FAT32 partition..
i use it mainly for watching tv shows on my dvd player (it has a usb port)
although i can read all the data off it..i am unable to copy new data succesfilly and copy data from it.
because if the harddisk is idle for around a minute it does not function anymore..
i tried to connect it directly to my computer(no usb) and it doesnt read at all..

is there any reason for it to stop working completely when idle?
i;ve tried various different cases, the same error on all..
 
It could be a bad power connector on the hard drive, but it might be due to the limitations of FAT32. Off-hand, I can't remember the maximum partition size, but realistically, 40GB is on the high-end for FAT32 safety. NTFS, HPFS (Mac), ResierFS (among other formats seen with Linux distros) are better able to cope with larger hard drive sizes.

If you can, see about either dividing up the drive into smaller partitions or formatting it with a different filesystem. If those aren't options, try doing a full format with FAT32. It's possible that there was a glitch.

Also, you might want to obtain Seagate's hard drive diagnostic tools if you don't have them already (you can download them for free off the company's website). The tools would tell you if you have a defective hard drive.
 
i used seagate desktop tools...
appears i have tons of bad sectors..
the seagate tool tried to replace the bad sectors...it failed to do so..
what software can i use now to remove them??
 
Its not really possible to remove bad sectors.
I think, though I might be wrong that a low level format might have sorted them in the past. You cant do low level formats anymore, modern drives simply dont support it. I dont just mean drives from the last couple of years either.

Bad sectors get re-allocated. ie there are spare sectors which are used to kind of replace the bad ones.

Diskcheckup is a quick and easy way of seeing what the state of your drive is. It may be that you are out of spares.
PassMark DiskCheckup - SMART hard disk drive monitoring software
Its a SMART error tool so you will need to enabel SMART monitoring in BIOS.

Wiki has a good simple reference to the codes.
Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you have loads of bad sectors its code 05 Reallocated Sectors Count which may be a problem here.
 
with the disk checkup software this is what i get...
reallocated sector count - raw value 370
status - ok
value - 91
worst - 91
threshold - 36
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top