Should external hard drives randomly corrupt?

Fenster

I purchased a Toshiba external hard drive about a month back and so far I've suffered massive partition corruption twice - I fly all the way to Las Vegas, plug it in and find that two of its three partitions went corrupt and I've lost all of my photo backups. Needless to say, I'm pissed.

Is this as symptom of the hard drive actually being physically faulty or possible due to how different OS' handle mounting it (OS X, Linux and Windows - I've never once had a problem with Linux, but OS X and Windows both randomly seem to choke on a random partition).

Sending it back to Ireland for exchange will be annoying, is there anything I can do in the interim other than finding file retrival software (any reccommendations?)

Ruu_Old

What file system is the Windows partition under, NTFS?

Fenster

It is

andy1249

How did you get it to the states , was it packed in your main check in luggage or was it hand carried ,

Maybe theres a possibility that the X rays affected it , the main check in X rays are much stronger than the hand carry ones , and will ruin film whereas the handcarry x rays wont.
Hard drives are a magnetic media and could well be affected depending on the shielding or lack thereof in your particular model.

In most american airports you are told this as you check in.

Just a possibility anyway.

MunsterCycling

What Distro are you using? Linux (due to Micro$softs refusal to hand over the code) can cause major problems for NTFS formatted disks due to corrupting the file structure, you are better off using FAT32 if you need to share amongst many OS's as this is read by them all.

MC

zilog_jones

Yeah, Linux NTFS support can be a bit dodge - dunno about other current distros but with Ubuntu they recommend the built-in NTFS support should only be used for reading, not writing.

You might be better off formatting it in Ext3 and getting that program (forget the name, there's probably a few others too) for Windows for reading it (and maybe putting the installer for it in a small FAT partition on the disk so you can install it elsewhere). I assume someone's made Ext3 support for Mac OS too.

I wouldn't recommend using FAT32 for big partitions - it was designed back when 4GB was "a lot". Basically it's old and cat, and fragments like the dickens.

MunsterCycling

True re FAT32 but compatability is what I was going for.

MC

Anyway, why would you want /need to use anything other than Linux??? LOL

Mutant_Fruit

No, it should't corrupt unless the harddrive is dodgy. I've mounted NTFS drives under linux and windows and they've never corrupted (although NTFS under linux is read-only, write support is marked as unsafe to use). If you really want compatibility between OS's use Fat32. But that has limitations with large HD sizes too. Formatting to EXT3 would be a no-go. I'd say most computers you'd come in contact with couldn't read it, making file transfer's quite awkward.

Capt'n Midnight

Do you ALWAYS shutdown the PC / Safely Remove Hardware / unmount the drive before removing it ?

check write caching too

Anti

I have the exact same hdd. only mine is the 320gb. And i had nothing but problems with it, it seems the problem is that if you move them around they get damaged very easilly. Im on my 5th so far. Still it only cost 100€ at xmas time

Fenster

Sorry for the delay in reply, I was asleep until now (go babies), my laptop is formatted with NFTS and HFS+, all the partitions on the external hard drive are FAT32, sorry for the confusion.

I had my hard drive in checked baggage, as I already had my camera and laptop in hand luggage. I've gone through the hard drive and everything except my photos are completely ruined, I'll be off to Fry's for DVDRs later on today.

Joy.