Hi:smileyhappy:
I've recently purchased a 500GB DriveStation HD-CE500U2 external drive and've been the using this drive, as two partitions (partitioned it myself, as a primary drive with an extended drive), for storage purposes and downloading video torrents.
The problem is that sometimes after a few hours, i.e., overnight and while I'm at work slaving my bollocks off, or after a couple of hours when I try to defrag either partition, the two drive letters disappear. I extract and replug the drive's USB cable back into the USB port, but to no avail, I must reboot the PC to get the drives back up and showing the drive letters again. Even went as far as unplugging the power cable and reinserting it!
Thought it may have been a power shortage, so upgraded to a 600 watt PSU, however the same problem still occurs.
Any answers to solve this problem? Is it my PC. a common problem (with a just as common fix), or should I just return it to the retailer? Could it be overheating (it's not sitting near anything which throws out heat, i.e., PC tower or monitor, not even the ADSL modem) or maybe a faulty USB cable?
This is one irritating water buffalo.
:smileyindifferent:
BTW, whilst the drive letters are missing, the drive still shows up in Device Manager.
Could it be possibly corrupted sectors in the drive itself? Can a poster recommend a suitable drive scan-repair tool?
If I was to return it to the computer shop which I bought it from, in the meantime I'd have to find somewhere to store 350GBs of data, so I rather not take this road and get it up and running on my own, with the forum's help, of course.
In dire staits here.
Beam me up Scotty! Is there anybody out there?
what file format are the partitions in?
have you tried this drive on another pc as well?
Mate, it's file format is NTFS for both partitions.
I've only the one comp, so I'd need to have a buddy who'd let me leave it on his rig for a couple of hours defragging, or downloading files for a couple of hours. Putting thought into this right now, but would rather sort it out here.
...and a partridge in a pear tree huh? Are you serious or what? I've 1.6GHz of raw Pentium 4 and a solid ECS motherboard. Why wouldn't this support the external drive?
The MB chipset's BIOS is the latest update and the OS is Vista SP1.
You reckon it might be an OS glitch, eh? Can you elaborate a bit?
At this point we are trying to eliminate as many possibilities as we can.
When they disappear can you see them in the disk manager?
Cheers mate. I appreciate your assistance. When the drive drops out, in device manager, all the dialogue stays the same as pre-drive dropouts. Took a pic to share - post-drive dropout,
(http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/aa99/dexterspics1/Device.jpg)
Try right clicking on my computer then go to manage then storage then disk management.
do this when you are experiencing the problem and post a screen shot of that image. This will tell us if you PC has an issue with the file structure of the drive. The device manager shows that its not a driver issue.
OK, sorry for the week's break, but had a dirty stick of ram which needed addressing and upgraded to Vista SP3. No change though, drive still drops out. Whilst it's dropped out, it doesn't register in Disk Management,
(http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/aa99/dexterspics1/Manage.jpg)
Unfortunately I don't know how to directly display images to Buffalo forum.
Also, hope the rebellion here, in Thailand, doesn't affect our net connection, i.e., replies, etc.
Also ran the drives' generic Window's error-checking tool and the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostic's Tool over the drive's two partitions. No problems found, both tool's checks showed no errors.
Rampant here for a solution. The kid needs his cartoons and wildlife shows.
Managed to run a defragment tool, O&O Defrag 10, completely over the first partition (without it disappearing) and it found like an extra 100 GBs of space, i,e., changed from 40 GBs of free space to over 140 GBs of free space. Don't know whether or not this is significant, but I certainly found it very unusual (however, I've had zero experience with heavy duty external drives. Only ever used USB flash drives).
Mmm...already have USB2 mate,
(http://i199.photobucket.com/albums/aa99/dexterspics1/enhanced.jpg)
Here's an update. The drive's been working for past three weeks. It hasn't dropped out again, even after a full defrag. I don't why it's suddenly come good, but I did also move home three weeks ago and subsequently had to unplug all the PC's cables. After the home relocation, they were all repluged back into the PC and the only change made was that the USB mouse had an adaptor added to it, so it could be plugged into the green PS/2 mouse connector and not a USB socket.
I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that the problems stay in the past.
:manhappy: