External hard drive problem

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gms49ers

gms49ers

Die hard Rush & 49ers Fan
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Pub Member / Supporter
May 9, 2008
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Boise, ID
I'm having a major problem with my external hard drive and I'm hoping someone here can offer some tips.

My external drive has been working fine for some time. Friday night we had a power failure and the drive was on. Saturday evening I wanted to watch one of the shows I have stored on it and the receiver did not recognize the drive and wanted to format it.

I wasn't too worried because I've experienced this in the past and it's always been easy to recover. I hooked the drive to my Linux server and backed it up like always. I then returned the drive to the Dish receiver (ViP 622) and let it format.

Here's where my problems began. It wouldn't format the drive, telling me that the format had failed. I took it back to my server and deleted the partitions, then hooked it back to the DVR. The format worked fine. Just to make sure everything was fine, I recorded two minutes of the show I was watching and copied it to the drive. All was fine. I could watch the show and copy it back to the DVR without issue.

For a sanity check I then powered off the drive and waited about 5 minutes then turned it back on. The drive was never disconnected or moved. The DVR wanted to format it again.

Long story short, the DVR will sometimes format it and most times fails. When it succeeds, and I turn the drive off and then back on without disconnecting it or moving it and it wants to format it.

I've checked the drive on my server, copied files back and forth to it and from it and there are no errors. I've tried a second smaller drive and I get the same problem with the DVR.

I'm hoping someone here can offer some help.

Thanks.
 
Thanks for getting back to me. Sorry if my frustration on this is coming through.

I'm not familiar with MHDD. Is this a Windows tool? I don't have access to a windows machine if it is.
 
I think the problem could just as likely be a failing USB bridge as a problem with the HDD. Since you're already running Linux, you might be able to get the SMART status using smartctl from the smartmontools package. However, you need to check the unreleased code out of CVS, as that is the only version that works across a USB bridge. If you know the maker of the USB bridge in your external HDD you can check whether it's supported by the version of smartctl in CVS.

SourceForge.net: smartmontools overview_USB-Support

I doubt MHDD (http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/)will be of any help since your USB bridge is likely unsupported by it. The commands to retrieve SMART data across a USB-SATA or USB-PATA bridge are vendor specific.
 
It was the external enclosure. I purchased a new one, put the old drive into it, and the system immediately recognized it and let me manage it. All my recordings were there and usable.

Thanks for the tips.
 
Could also be the enclosure Power Supply. I've seen a number of bad ones. I'm especially
leary of the ones with a 1.5a rating (prefer 2a or better).

Bottom line... I've had many enclosure issues and very few drive issues (internal hdd is all most never the problem).
 

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