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external hdd problem

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  • 05-11-2008 5:24pm
    #1
    jordo76
    Registered Users Posts: 114 ✭✭


    hi all

    i dont clame to know anything about computers but i have an external hdd 500gb iomega, i have only loaded it with about 100gb of music nothing else in it and all of a sudden i was getting this error (cyclic redundancy check fix), so i tryed to get as much of the data back off it as i could about 50gb, so then i wanted to format it but when i get to 2% it just stops :( is there anything i can do to solve this or may i just through it in the bin ????


    thanks for looking


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    #2
    Anti
    Closed Accounts Posts: 12,401 ✭✭✭✭Anti


    You could check the iomega site for a hard drive tool. You will probably have to connect the hard drive internally to get this to work, via sata or ide. Failing that there are some 3rd party software option.... all of which i can think of right now :(


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    #3
    Soundman
    Registered Users Posts: 2,593 ✭✭✭Soundman


    This is a solution I used to repair a HDD based MP3 player but the logic behind it is still the same.

    Robbed from another forum...


    I came across numerous threads that were helpful. One thread would have a bit of good advice here. Another would have another alternative. I tried them all and was able to get the essential stuff off the drive and prep it for RMA. But a quick call to iRiver America Tech Support led me to a simple solution that appears to have saved my player from a trip to Milpitas. My goal in starting this thread is to give others a head start in the event that they would need to know what I have spent the past day researching. The following assumes you have a Windows XP system and don't feel strange poking around with the command prompt (read: start -> run -> cmd.exe -> ok button).

    1. If you're using your player as a backup drive, or if you are like me and use your player as a recorder, you're probably going to have files that you will want to get off of there. After using the windows explorer to move the unaffected files to a safe place, and after finishing using the player as a backup HDD or whatever, get to your command prompt and type:
    CHKDSK e: /r
    the /r is like the /f switch, which fixes errors on the disk. /r performs the /f operation but goes one step further, though, and roots out bad sectors on the disk and does what it can with the file system to recover readable information. What it can't recover, it patches so that you can go back to the windows explorer and extract the rest of the files from your player.
    2. With the files extracted, you'll probably want to do some sort of sophisticated scandisk check. Such a check may reveal whether the player's drive just has bad sectors or whether the drive has graver problems. For this, you might want to consider using tools from Norton, O&O Defrag (for surface evaluation) or SpinRite.*
    3. If you're dealing with bad sectors, try this:
    Do a quick format of the drive through Windows XP. My Computer -> right click the HDD -> format -> click box for "quick format" -> MAKE SURE THAT THE FILE SYSTEM IS SET TO "FAT32" -> click "Format." It should only take a minute. This, too, will erase what's on your drive.
    Doing this should not only erase what's on your drive but it also seems to completely rewrite the FAT. I wish I knew more about how this works, but it seems to wipe clean the whole FAT and refresh it with a new one. To some, this might make perfect sense. To others, it suffices to say that the drive seems to forget that it had bad sectors in the first place -- either that or the sectors that were bad forget that they were bad.
    c. For good measure, you might want to do a full format of the drive instead. To do this, follow 3b but ensure that the "quick format" box is not checked. This will probably take 10 minutes or so, depending on the speed of your computer and the USB connection.
    The format(s) is/are what fixed my bad sectors. Follow up surface scans revealed that the bad sectors no longer existed, or if they did exist, they had been repaired. I don't know how, but I wish I did. I'm probably oversimplifying, but hopefully not by much.
    4. To make sure that the bad sectors have not just forgotten the fact that they're bad, consider exercising the drive's read/write capabilities. To do this, I wrote a batch program** that filled the player's drive with 9,783*** copies of a 1,954 KB (2,000,000 bytes) text file.**** I then wrote a program that copied those text files from the player back to the hard drive.***** if it made it through both operations without a hangup, I was satisfied that my drive was probably ok.

    Once you have done this and it is seemingly working you can reformat the HDD back to NTFS if you need to.


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