I've got a WD 500GB External that i've been using for a few months now. Up until a few days ago, when I was downloading Azureus suddenly gave me an I/O Error when copying to the drive. I've had it happen twice now, but simply deleted the problematic downloads and carried on. But I am worried now. One of the files downloaded successfully but today after spending nearly 30 minutes trying to delete it (command prompt couldn't delete it either) the drive was able to remove the folder during the chkdsk. What bothers me now though, is that the drive itself is running fine again with no problems, and no I/O Errors (save the two i got the other day), but whenever I run the WD Diagnostics on it, the test fails. I'm assuming it's trying to tell me the drive is bad, but yet it doesn't appear to be. Chkdsk runs without any errors either now. Should I be worried? I am thinking of buying a new 500GB and migrating all the files to it as a precaution, I've already had 2 External Drives fail on me. Don't want to lose 250gb of data from this one. Also: Don't know it performs the same type of test but I downloaded Hard Drive Test Pilot 2.6 and it said everything was ok.
WD Diagnostics was running a deep scan but got hung up on one of the sectors for like 30 minutes and finally told me it had a bad sector. I've already purchased a new 500GB and I am going to start copying everything over while this drive is still "working" though bad. This thing is a mess. Though it is erroring out quite a bit on some files being copied, I can actually use/view them from the original drive. Arghhh this is stupid. How is the drive unable to be copied from, yet able to be read? Makes no sense to me.
i'm going through the same thing right now. fortunately my drive only has system partitions and my music folder on it, and the system partitions are imaged on DVD and my music is all backed up on my mp3 player. my new drive won't get here until friday though i think what is happening with the copy is that if there is a bad bit in the file it fails to copy, but unless that bad bit is in the file descriptor it shows up fine in explorer. it's really a pain in the ass though. make sure you get your warranty to replace the drive. i think i'm still in my seagate 5yrs, but i can't find any record of when i purchased it so i'm screwed
I don't have the original reciept, and probably don't have the box it came in either (Stupid me). That's ok though. I've gotten about 90% of everything copied over. Do you think it is possible that plugging the drive into a different system might work with copying over the other files I can't get? It's not a huge deal though if I can't, I've written down what I can't copy so I can get it again later. I'm also going to invest in a small APC just for that drive now since it decided to take a dump on me when my Apartment had 3 straight power surges (10 minutes apart).
i doubt another machine will help, it's not the machine that's giving you problems, it's the platter. it's always worth trying. it's really weird that power surges would have any effect on your disks. if the surge made it through the power supply there are plenty of more delicate things that you think it would have screwed up more than the disks.
