Dunvi

Yeah. In the past week, I've had a bunch of songs pop up in my foobar as "corrupted". First thing this morning, I set avast to run a full system virus scan, including my external (all my music is on there); no viruses, but I did get a whole list of files, all with the same error message: Unscannable, "cyclic redundancy check".

This drive, btw, isn't even 3 months old yet. Christ.

I have a back-up from those 3 months ago, thankfully - nothing really important missing on the back-up; a couple of songs, but not really much. It's also just a couple of songs that are corrupted, so this isn't too bad. I just want to make sure I'm doing the right things to deal with this:

Step 1: downloading EASEUS disk copy. Will make a full back up of failing drive.

Step 2: copy everything except the corrupted files (I have a full list, a few precise files around it, and the entire K-artist section)

Step 3: run chkdsk

What else? Should I be thinking of throwing out this hard drive asap? Google thinks I should...

raptor_pa

Try unstoppable copier, it will allow you to set retries and timing on the corrupted, files, copy the good files first, and won't fail when their is a bad read. Rather than run chkdsk, zero wipe the drive and then run the manufacturer's diagnostics - reformat and reuse if it passes the diags, if it fails, return under warranty. CRC failures can be logical, but are often physical issues.

Dunvi

I can't find the diagnostics utility for iomega drives - it's not listed either. Any alternatives suggested? Should I just use CHKDSK like I'd originally planned? (feel free to tell me how, by the way, because I'll be googling otherwise.)

[ETA: I went in and snagged everything that'd been changed or added since I last backed up (surprisingly little. Whoops). At this point, I'm perfectly willing to do anything that might completely dessicate the drive.

Also, I belatedly have realized that there's a separate forum for external media, such as my USB hard drive. Whoops. Sorry - I just looked for "hard drive".]

raptor_pa

The drive inside is not from Iomega, they don't make drives, just repackage others in their enclosure. Look in device manager under disk drives and properties - it should identify the actual drive. Most of the Iomegas I'v eseen use Seagate, but there have beena few with WD and Samsung also. You'll need to identify the actual drive to ge the ustil. Chkdsk can actually cause more problems if the drive has physical issues, it only works at the logical file system level.

Dunvi

!!! I did not know that! You learn something new every day (and I'm glad my lesson today was not only that I'm failing AP Physics. But I digress). *heads off to check*

[EDIT: It's a seagate. Yay. (So's my internal, hm.)

Double never mind. If I would just read the FAQs first, I'd have a whole lot less questions. And btws, man, this is so much easier when nothing's under warranty.]

raptor_pa

LOL I have an "I void waranties" T-shirt. Download the Seagate seatolls utility and let us know what that shows. Then we'll determine the next step.

Dunvi

Just finished. Bombed the short DST in less than half a second, ran the long generic test, found 6 problems, but it made it through without bombing which means that it "fixed" them (although the description of fixed I found in the manual implies that this is less than fixed). A second short DST passed, so... safe to use? If you think so, I'll probably reformat and rebuild my external hard-drive from the (unorganized, whoops) back-up drive. I'd rather have the active disk fail than the back-up, since if the back-up starts failing I probably wouldn't notice until I tried to access the back-up.

*is going to bed. before 3 in the morning, for once*

raptor_pa

Yeah, fixing involves remapping the bad sectors to spares, but that is about the only fix there is. I would tend to continue using the disk, however, as always, keep your backups current.