[ED E]

Linux 1 Windows Nil

[I Kill You Scum!]

I would keep an eye on the drive because I am suspicious about the health of it. Certainly run at least one full diagnostic to break in the drive and make sure every sector is readable.

Seagate are quite unreliable lately so also in future make sure any important data is not stored just on the Seagate.

[yoyo]

I would certainly run a hard disk diagnostics on the drive (such as Vivard) to check if it has any bad sectors. I've never encountered any issues formatting drives from within Windows os, and I've done it quite a bit!

Nick

[Zascar]

Thanks - yes that does sounds like a good idea.

I just downloaded Vivard but it just says "No Floppy drives found" and nothing I do can get me past that screen. Any suggestions?

Going to give the Ultimate boot cd a go I think its on there.

[I Kill You Scum!]

If you ever need to RMA the drive then you'll need Seatools for Windows to give you the error code. So might as well install it now.

Its got some standard diagnostic tools, drive self-test etc. Just be aware that the long test will take hours for a 2TB drive.

Personally before running any diagnostics I would write 0s to the entire drive, if there are any problems it helps them to show up quicker.

You can do that from within Windows using something like CCleaner. If you've already copied some data on, then use the 'Free space only' option in CCleaner, it will write to every sector except the bits with data. Will take hours of course.

If everything is healthy, I would also check for firmware updates before copying data to the drive. Firmware updates should be relatively safe but on the off-chance it bricks the drive it'd be better to do it now rather than later when it's got a tonne of stuff on it.

[yoyo]

Originally Posted by Zascar

Thanks - yes that does sounds like a good idea.

I just downloaded Vivard but it just says "No Floppy drives found" and nothing I do can get me past that screen. Any suggestions?

Going to give the Ultimate boot cd a go I think its on there.

Yeah I use it from UBCD, never ran it another way, Seatools for DOS is decent aswell (for any brand)

Nick

[Zascar]

So, quick update, I did loads of scans but everything came up fine - but I was still getting loads and loads of problems. I got another small spare hard drive, installed Windows 7 - and all these problems have gone away. It's been perfect. Just in case, I formatted the new 2TB drive again, but I was able to copy everything over perfectly, no issues whatsoever. Not sure why but even on two different clean installs of xp it was hanging and begin weird, not liking drives etc. I'm going to stick with 7 for the moment. So so glad I have all these problems fixed now.

However, there is only one problem remaining. While copying over my many directories to my new hard drive, all but one copied fine. One of them had a subdirectory which was working a few days ago, but it gave a copy error, and now when I go into it, the directory seems to be there but none of the files. Hmmm

Is there any program that I can point to this directory that can try to get it to recover the files? Annoyingly they are some photos that are not that critical but sentimentally important and I'd love to get them back...

[unkel]

Originally Posted by Zascar

Is there any program that I can point to this directory that can try to get it to recover the files? Annoyingly they are some photos that are not that critical but sentimentally important and I'd love to get them back...

Try PhotoRec

It's free, easy to use and it works out quite well some of the time...